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Boston Athenaeum

The Boston Athenaeum, one of the oldest and most distinguished independent libraries in the United States, was founded in 1807 by members of the Anthology Society, a group of fourteen Boston gentlemen who had joined together in 1805 to edit The Monthly Anthology and Boston Review. Their purpose was to form "an establishment similar to that of the Athenaeum and Lyceum of Liverpool in Great Britain; combining the advantages of a public library [and] containing the great works of learning and science in all languages." The library and Art Gallery, established in 1827, were soon flourishing, and grew rapidly, both by purchase of books and art and by frequent gifts. For nearly half a century the Athenaeum was the unchallenged center of intellectual life in Boston, and by 1851 had become one of the five largest libraries in the United States. Today its collections comprise over half a million volumes, with particular strengths in Boston history, New England state and local history, biography, English and American literature, and the fine and decorative arts. The Athenaeum supports a dynamic art gallery, and sponsors a lively variety of events such as lectures and concerts. It also serves as a stimulating center for discussions among scholars, bibliophiles, and a variety of community interest groups.break

http://www.bostonathenaeum.org

Tremont Row: Artists' Daguerreotype Rooms

Tue, Feb 28, 2006

Grant Romer, curator of the Addison Gallery of American Art's "Daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes" exhibition, shows how new research has revealed that the architecture of the renowned Tremont Row studio played a highly significant role in the development of the distinctive style of the partnership. With ample illustrations, he recounts how this understanding of the physical space was reconstructed and demonstrates how much it has added to appreciating the artistry of these acknowledged masters of early photography. Romer's acclaimed exhibition "Young America: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes" offers an unparalleled opportunity to view 150 perfectly illuminated daguerreotypes created by the famous Boston partnership of Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes. Through their lens we come face to face with great statesman, intellectuals, and celebrities, glimpse intimate family portraits, and examine the very bricks and clouds of the mid-19th century.

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Letters of a Portuguese Nun: 17th Century Forbidden Love

Tue, Feb 21, 2006

Myriam Cyr makes the case that the nun, Mariana Alcoforado, is indeed the author of one of the great literary masterpieces of the 17th century, *Portuguese Letters*. Mariana's story is one of the most moving in the history of forbidden love. In 1669, a Parisian bookseller published a slim volume called *Portuguese Letters*, which unveiled a love affair between a young Portuguese nun and a French officer that had occurred a few years earlier during a chaotic and war torn period in Portugal. The book contained passionate love letters the nun had written when the officer was forced to return to France. The letters took Paris by storm. They spoke of love in a manner so direct, so precise, and so raw that they sent shivers of recognition through the sophisticated strata of polite society. Through the centuries they have captured the hearts of poets and painters alike and retain all of their beauty and power today. Stendhal said "one has not loved until they have loved like the Portuguese nun." Braque and Matisse tried to imagine her. As remarkable as the letters are, they are rivaled by the mystery that surrounds them. Scholars debate whether a Portuguese nun could have written words of such stunning truth and beauty preferring to believe that a French aristocrat wrote the letters in answer to a dare.

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Banjo-Wielding Women in Art

Tue, Sep 19, 2006

Anglo-female banjoists appear in myriad American paintings, photographs, illustrations, and advertisements from the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. Their presence is equally apparent, and yet more charged, in twentieth-century visual culture. The earlier artists often aligned the banjo with female achievement and enlightenment, yet the instrument was at best an ambiguous emblem of early twentieth-century New Womanhood, with any hint of feminist reform tempered by the literary, visual, and commercial contexts in which a bevy of increasingly coquettish banjo-wielding women appear. This talk traces that evolution, from Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassam, and Frances Benjamin Johnston to the contemporary muralist Margaret Kilgallen and the singing group Dixie Chicks where the instrument challenges male hegemonies in art and music. Leo G. Mazow is curator of American art at the Palmer Museum of Art at the Pennsylvania State University, where he is also affiliate associate professor of art history. He received his Ph.D. in art history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His essays and reviews have appeared in *American Art*, *Southern Cultures*, and *Railroad Heritage*. He has also written and edited several exhibition catalogues, including *Picturing the Banjo*, *Arneson and the Object*, and *George Inness: The 1880s and 1890s*.

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Siegfried Sassoon: A Poet's Life

Thu, May 25, 2006

Max Egremont tells the story of Siegfried Sassoon, one of the most famous famous young writers of the 1910's, a mentor to Wilfred Owen, and an inspiration to Winston Churchill and T.E. Lawrence. Siegfried Sassoon was born in 1886 in Kent, and began writing verses as a boy. As a brave young officer, he confronted the terrible realities of the First World War on the battlefield, in verse, and, finally, by announcing his opposition to the war in 1917, showing that physical courage could exist alongside humanity and sensibility. He joined the Labour Party, became literary editor of the socialist Daily Herald, and began close friendships with Thomas Hardy and E.M. Forster while trying to grow as a poet in peacetime. Then Sassoon fell in love with the aristocratic aesthete Stephen Tennant, who led him into the group of "bright young things" who inspired the early novels of Evelyn Waugh. At the demise of his passionate but fraught relationship with Tennant, Sassoon suddenly married the beautiful Hester Gatty in 1933 and retreated to a quiet country life until their eventual estrangement and Sassoon's subsequent conversion to Catholicism. From his famous war poems to the gentler vision of his prose, Sassoon wrote masterfully of war and lost idylls, and this work and its complex author are brilliantly illuminated in Max Egremont's definitive biography, which draws from unprecedented access to Sassoon's complete papers.

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Bess Hardwick: First Lady of Chatsworth

Thu, May 11, 2006

Mary S. Lovell explores the life of Bess Hardwick, an ambitious figure who became the matriarch of one of the most powerful family dynasties in England and died one of the wealthiest in England's history. Bess Hardwick, the fifth of six daughters of an impoverished English nobleman, did not have a particularly auspicious start in life. Born in 1527 into the most brutal and turbulent period of England's history, she was widowed for the first time at sixteen, married three more times, and outlived four monarchs. By the time Bess's first child, Frances, was six years old, three of her illustrious godparents had been beheaded. She survived through England's violent political and social upheaval, bore eight children, and built an extraordinary empire that included the great houses of Chatsworth and Hardwick. Through journals, letters, court reports, inventories and account books, Lovell charts the rise of an astonishingly tenacious woman, one who loved extravagant furnishings and fine clothes and who inspired passionate uxoriousness in her husbands; a woman who was generous, hardheaded and brave. What is revealed is not simply an intimate portrait of one woman but also of all Tudor society.

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Rough Crossings: Blacks and the Revolutionary War

Thu, May 11, 2006

Simon Schama discusses his book Rough Crossings, which turns on a single huge question: if you were black in America at the start of the Revolutionary War, whom would you want to win? Tens of thousands gave their answer, voting with their feet for Britain and King George. In response to a declaration by the Governor of Virginia that any rebel-owned slave who escaped and served the King would be emancipated, tens of thousands of slaves, Americans who clung to the sentimental notion of British freedom, escaped from farms, plantations, and cities to try to reach the British camp. This mass movement lasted as long as the war did, and a military strategy originally designed to break the plantations of the American South had unleashed the greatest uprising in American history. Schama details the odyssey of the escaped blacks through the fires of war and the terror of potential recapture at the war's end, into inhospitable Nova Scotia, where thousands who had served the Crown were betrayed, and, in a little-known hegira of the slave epic, shipped across the broad, stormy ocean to Sierra Leone.

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Nancy Lancaster: English Country House Style

Tue, Oct 10, 2006

Martin Wood explores Nancy Lancaster's substantial contribution to the arts of interior decoration and garden design. Nancy Lancaster (1897-1994) was one of the premier tastemakers of the 20th century and essentially created what is known as the English Country House Style, which emphasized a mixture of chintzes and antique furniture. The owner of Colefax and Fowler, an influential British decorating firm that codified this quintessentially English look, Lancaster had an assured sense of scale, boldness, a sharp wit, and an instinctive understanding of how to make a house mellow, elegant, and unpretentious. She carried the same clean elegance into the garden, where she worked in a formal yet romantic neo-Georgian style. Wood discusses Lancaster's houses and gardens including Mirador in Virginia; Kelmarsh Hall in Northamptonshire, England; Ditchley Park, in Oxfordshire; and Haseley Court. He discusses Lancaster's remarkable personal life, her dynamic design partnership with John Fowler, and her interactions with friends, including her aunt Nancy Astor, Duff and Lady Diana Cooper, David Niven, and Winston Churchill. This illustrated lecture includes images of Lancaster, her houses, her gardens, and her friends by celebrated artists and photographers, including John Singer Sargent, Cecil Beaton, and Horst P. Horst. This lecture was cosponsored by the Royal Oak Foundation.

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Satyr Square: A Year, A Life in Rome

Thu, Oct 12, 2006

Leonard Barkan discusses *Satyr Square*, which is part memoir, part literary criticism, part culinary and aesthetic travelogue, and overall a poignant and hilarious narrative about an American professor spending a magical year in Rome. A scarred veteran of academic culture wars, Leonard Barkan is at first hungry, lonely, and uncertain of his intellectual mission. But soon he is appointed unofficial mascot of an eccentric community of gastronomes, becomes virtually bilingual, and falls in love. As the year progresses, he finds his voice as a writer, loses his lover, and returns definitively to America. His book is the celebration of a life lived in the uncanny spaces where art and real people intersect.

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Ann Patchett: Run

Tue, Sep 25, 2007

Ann Patchett reads from her fifth novel *Run*, which explores what "family" means and how we forge our allegiances while still asserting our identities. Set within a 24-hour period, the novel, like much of Patchett's work, examines what happens when disparate lives intersect, as well as the obligations we bear to strangers. *Run* is both the story of one loving family's insular bonds and an examination of community, for which we are all accountable.

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Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past

Sat, Apr 26, 2003

Jeremy Black, professor of history at the University of Exeter, argues that historical atlases offer an understanding of the past that is invaluable, not only because they convey a previous age's sense of space and distance, but also because they reveal what historians and educators of those periods thought important to include or omit. Black explores the role, development, and nature of these important reference tools, from ancient to modern times.

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