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Imaging rare, unusual, and intriguing objects at the Brown University Library

Civil War General Hawkins’ sword to return to Annmary Brown Memorial

August 30, 2013 by | Comments Off on Civil War General Hawkins’ sword to return to Annmary Brown Memorial

As announced earlier this summer in a Brown University press release and on the Library News blog, a silver Tiffany presentation sword once owned by General Rush Hawkins (Annmary Brown Memorial benefactor, 1831–1920) is returning to Brown. The sword was stolen from Brown sometime during the 1970s, and subsequently switched ownership at least four times.

Shown below are two portraits of a young Rush Hawkins: a 1863 engraving by John Chester Buttre based on a photo by Mathew Brady (click image below for a zoomable image view), and a 1860 portrait by Jacob D. Blondel currently housed in the Annmary Brown Memorial building (photographed by DPS for a Memorial promotional brochure).

Hawkins-Buttre

Hawkins by Buttre/Brady

Hawkins-by-Jacob-D-Blondel-1860

Hawkins portrait by Blondel

Cabinets in the front section of the Annmary Brown Memorial, pictured below, showcase swords from the Cyril and Harriet Mazansky British Sword Collection, part of the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection.

amb-swords-1

Swords from the Cyril and Harriet Mazansky British Sword Collection (Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection). Photo: Lindsay Elgin.

amb-swords-2

Swords from the Cyril and Harriet Mazansky British Sword Collection (Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection). Photo: Lindsay Elgin.

The Library will officially celebrate the return of Hawkins’ presentation sword on November 7, 2013 at 3:00 p.m., at the Annmary Brown Memorial. The event will feature brief presentations, a performance by the Higher Keys (Brown’s oldest co-ed a cappella group), and refreshments.

The Martial Macaroni: Pray Sirs, Do You Laugh at Me?

August 21, 2013 by | 2 Comments

This macaroni from Woolwich, has topped of his look with a feather in his cap.

This summer in Providence, there has been much to-do about the dandy, thanks to the well-received Artist/Rebel/Dandy: Men of Fashion exhibit at the RISD Museum. In the early part of the 19th century, Beau Brummel did much for bringing English dandy fashion into vogue, but going back a bit further in time to the mid-18th century we find another type of fashionable fellow, the macaroni. Possessing qualities of the fops and beaus of the earlier part of the century (1), the macaroni came into being as well-traveled British young men who had been to Italy on the Grand Tour returned to London stylishly dressed and with a taste for macaroni. These elite young men who dressed in high fashion (tight trousers, curled powered wigs, spy glasses, walking sticks with giant tassels, delicate shoes, and tiny chapeaus) were said to belong to the “Macaroni Club.” For a time, anything and all things the height of fashion were said to be macaroni. However, before long the term came to describe not the stylish but anyone who “exceeded the ordinary bounds of fashion” (2). The macaroni with its self idolatry and extravagance quickly became associated with absurdity and Continental affectation. The phenomena was ripe for caricature and satire.

A wig with a long queue or “club” of hair behind epitomized the macaroni’s extravagant artifice during the early 1770’s (5). It is certainly possible that some were laughing.

One of the first professional caricaturists in England was the artist, engraver, and print-seller Mary Darly. Although not well known today, she wrote, illustrated and published the first book on caricature drawing (A Book of Caricaturas, c. 1762). Mary, a self-described “fun merchant”, and her husband, Matthew, were out front in their ridicule of the macaroni, and they created dozens of popular prints illustrating the macaroni’s extreme fashion and artifice, while mocking British submission to foreign tastes. The Darly’s shop in the fashionable west end of London came to be known as the “The Macaroni Print-Shop” (3). The Darly’s caricatures wed the spectacular eccentricity of the macaroni with typical English middle class behaviors and professions, while highlighting a fixation on upward mobility (4). Between 1771 and 1773 they published six sets of satirical “macaroni” prints, each set containing 24 portraits. The Fancy dress and pomp of the British military, especially it’s officers, were hardly exempt from satire, and 19 of the Darly prints depicting British military figures in humorous scenes are a part of the Prints, Drawings, and Watercolors from the Anne S.K. Brown Collection.

The Woolwich, Martial, and Parade Macaroni engraved prints feature British officers sporting the effeminate dress and elaborate hairstyles popular during the macaroni craze. A Smart Macaroni portrays a chubby officer blowing a hunting horn in the forest, the verse below reading:

The Smart Macaroni    View the Hog in Armour how he Blows,
    Swell’d with Pride. for SMART it is God knows.

The inside joke here is that the “hog in armour” depicted is a Capt. Smart of the British Army.

Cut to day one of the Revolutionary War. As the smartly turned out British soldiers march to battle, they sing a popular tune ridiculing the poorly dressed Yankees (a doodle was a term to describe a backwards country bumpkin).  The message of the song is that the fashion-naive Yankee simpleton believed that sticking a feather in one’s cap was all that was needed in the making of a macaroni (6).

For more information on British caricature and political satire, see the student essay Impressions of the Military in English Political Satire of the Georgian and Victorian Eras, and browse the hundreds of caricatures found in the Prints, Drawings, and Watercolors from the Anne S.K. Brown Collection and in Napoleonic Satires.

1. & 4. West, The Darly Macaroni Prints and the Politics of “Private Man.” Eighteenth-Century Life 25.2 [2001] pp.170-182

2. & 3. Rauser, “Hair, Authenticity, and the Self-Made Macaroni”, Eighteenth-Century Studies 38.1 pp. 101-117

5. http://blog.seattlepi.com/bookpatrol/2010/03/11/the-mother-of-pictorial-satire-or-why-did-yankee-doodle-call-his-hat-macaroni/

6. United States National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

The Parade Macaroni

Capt. Fitzpatrick’s effeminate frills and powered wig with a large club of hair attached would have clearly marked him as a macaroni.

 

 

 

 

 

P. as in Paul?

August 2, 2013 by | 1 Comment

While a great deal of the photography that I do here at Brown involves planned projects (often from our Signature Collections), we also get requests from patrons and scholars from around the world, as well as curators within Brown. These requests can be of very interesting and unusual materials, and it’s often a surprise what we get to photograph.

Last year, I was heading down to the bindery when I ran into Marie Malchodi, a book conservation technician, and Michelle Venditelli, the preservation manager. Marie had just discovered an engraving tucked into the pages of a science textbook donated by Solomon Drowne, class of 1773. It was signed:

Revere-sign

The engraving had already been moved to the Hay Library, and inspected by Richard Noble, rare books cataloger. He was able to confirm that it is indeed P. Revere as in Paul Revere, and this particular engraving has only four other known copies. I kept my eyes peeled for it coming into the production requests, since I was hoping to get to see it in person and maybe even photograph it. When it came into my photography queue a week or so later, I was more than thrilled to get to interact so closely with such a rare and fascinating find.

Revere

It was a very exciting time here at the Brown University Library, and there was a great deal of publicity regarding the find. Among other news outlets, the New York Times and NPR both ran stories; Brown also made a special news post. And I got to snag a piece of the bragging rights!