May 8, 2014 by rness | Comments Off on Today, it’s all about Ducks!
It’s been an exciting day all across campus, as the SciLi Duck made a perilous trek with her newly hatched brood from Brown’s Sciences Library down the hill to the Providence River, where Papa duck was waiting. Let’s celebrate the newsmaking mallards with this detail of a colored engraving from American ornithology, or, The natural history of the birds of the United States, published in 1808.
April 3, 2014 by rness | Comments Off on Magnolia Season
The blooming of the magnolia trees on campus is not far off (believe it or not!). With my thoughts on these long awaited blossoms, I type “magnolia” into the Brown Digital Repository and discover a beautiful 18th century hand colored intaglio print. The variety of magnolia represented in the print is known as Magnolia altissima lauro-cerassi folio, flore ingenti candido, Catesb. (commonly called the Laurel-Leaved Tulip Tree or Carolina Laurel) and is named for 18th century naturalist, Mark Catesby. Catesby spent three years documenting the flora and fauna of South Carolina, Florida and the Bahamas in the 1720’s. The tree featured in the print produced its flowers in the garden of Sr. Charles Wager at Parsons Green near Fulham, in August of 1737. The print was delineated and engraved by George Dennis Ehret (1708-1770), and is part of Joannis Martyn‘s Historia plantarum rariorum [1. The volume is part of the Albert E. Lownes Collection of Significant Books in the History of Science, a collection particularly strong for illustrated materials on natural history.]
According to the Campus Guide to Trees and Shrubs, Brown University is home to three varieties of magnolia trees; Magnolia acuminata or Cucumber Tree, Magnolia soulangiana or Saucer Magnolia, and Magnolia stellata or Star Magnolia. As the days warm, and I walk around campus during the coming month, I will be noting which of the fourteen stages the buds and blossoms are in.
1. The bud of the Flower as it first Appears.
2. The involucrum which encloses the Bud.
3. The Emplalement or Flower-cup.
4. The Flower-cup opening and discovering the Flower.
5. The cup falling of(sic) from the Flower.
6. The Flower-cup as it Appears before it is expanded.
7. The outside of the Apex or summit Represented.
8. The inside of the summit Represented.
9. The Ovary or Rudiment of the Fruit.
10. A Ripe Fruit with the seed falling from their cells and hanging by small threads.
11. A Seed as it Appears in it’s Cell.
12. A Seed falling out of it’s Cell.
13. The Footstalk with the marks where the Petals or Flower leaves were inserted.
14. A Flower fully expanded which is 11 inches in Diameter and has 10 Petals.
February 26, 2014 by rness | 2 Comments
When I recently came across an article about the abandoned and overgrown Grossinger’s Resort Hotel, I became fixated on the photographs of the pool within the resort’s natatorium. I recognized the space (but barely) from a collection of ephemera, which we digitized for The Catskills Institute several years ago.
Grossinger’s New Indoor Swimming Pool. “Superchrome” postcard. c.196-
The distinctive, once orderly, deck chairs now stand alone in the muck and moss, or have been tossed like bones into the bottom of the graffiti laden pool, joining muddy strings of blue beaded lane markers. The signature tile work is faintly recognizable under the encroaching moss, and the star burst lamp still hangs from the ceiling. I knew how tragically abandoned the formerly thriving resorts in the Catskill Mountains had become, and had seen photographic evidence of just how overgrown and lost these spaces currently are, but the images of the natatorium haunt; the building sits upon the landscape like a perpetually decomposing corpse. In the mid-century (when the indoor pool was constructed) the resort was thriving, as it had been since the 1920s. Grossinger’s gradually declined throughout the 1970s, a decline which hastened when the property was sold in 1986.[1. Abandoned NY: Inside Grossinger’s Crumbling Catskill Resort Hotel.] Many items of interest pertaining to Grossinger’s, including an Auction notice and contents for sale, can be found in Brown’s Digital Repository. Most of the resort’s buildings have now been demolished, but the natatorium still stands as a ghostly relic; its remnants pointing to fragmented memories, an uncanny space filled with abandoned objects of leisure being consumed by nature itself.
Photo by Pablo Maurer. Abandoned NY: Inside Grossinger’s Crumbling Catskill Resort Hotel
November 12, 2013 by rness | 3 Comments
I wear a couple of hats here at Brown University, one as staff member of Digital Production Services, aiding in the production of digitized resources for library collections and faculty projects, and another as a MA student in the Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage. Often, these professional and academic roles overlap and intersect. Increasing student and faculty engagement with library collections through use of digitized materials within the Brown Digital Repository is a rewarding aspect of the work we do in Digital Production Services. Quite often, I find myself utilizing the digital resources that I have had a hand in creating in my own scholarly research. For instance, the topic under discussion in my graduate section for AMST1250B: Graves and Burial Grounds this week has been the gravestone designs of Rhode Island architect Thomas Alexander Tefft.
Original receiving tomb designed by Tefft.
Image: Swan Point Cemetery
The Thomas Alexander Tefft architectural drawings 1844-1859 are a part of Brown Archival and Manuscript Collections Online, and the nearly four hundred Tefft drawings that constitute the collection are available in the Brown Digital Repository. I knew that Tefft was a native Rhode Islander (born in Richmond in 1826), and a graduate of Brown University (Class of 1851).[1. Mitchell, Encyclopedia Brunoniana (Brown University Library, 1993; pp. 536-537).] I also knew that Tefft designed many local private residences and public buildings, like Providence’s first Union Station and Rhode Island School of Design’s Memorial Hall. What I didn’t know was that Tefft was also a prolific designer of tombs, monuments and gravestones, many of which can be viewed in Swan Point Cemetery.
Tefft’s design for Central Congregational Chuch, now RISD’s Memorial Hall.
Tefft’s signature rundbogenstil (or rounded arch) Romanesque style[2. Curran, The Romanesque Revival: Religion, Politics, and Transnational Exchange (Penn State Press, 2003; p. 139).] can be seen both in Swan Point’s receiving tomb, which I had the opportunity to view last week as a part of our class’s walking tour of the Cemetery, and in the details of RISD’s Memorial Hall (originally Central Congregational Church) on Benefit Street. The towers of the building, seen in Tefft’s drawing, were damaged in the 1938 hurricane and subsequently removed. While Greek and Gothic revival styles were all the rage in America during the 1830s and ’40s, Tefft favored the revival styles of the Renaissance and the Romanesque. Brown’s collection of Tefft architectural drawings include designs for over 50 gravestones and tombs, in which the range of revival styles can be seen in the Classical, Egyptian, and Romanesque motifs he employed.
Remarkably, Tefft’s substantial body of work was created in just 14 years. In 1859, at the age of 33, the architect died of a fever while in Italy on a Grand Tour.[3. Curran, The Romanesque Revival: Religion, Politics, and Transnational Exchange (Penn State Press, 2003; p. 139).] Initially, Tefft was buried at Florence’s English Cemetery, but in February of 1860 his body was shipped back to Providence and re-interred in Swan Point Cemetery. Teftt is buried beside James Bucklin, another important figure in Rhode Island architecture, under a gravestone of his own design.[4. Mitchell, Encyclopedia Brunoniana (Brown University Library, 1993; pp. 536-537).]
The Tefft gravestone design, which now marks his own grave in Swan Point Cemetery.
In 1988, the Department of Art at Brown University collaborated with the National Building Museum on a student-curated exhibit held at Brown’s Bell Gallery. The catalog for the exhibit, Thomas Alexander Tefft: American Architecture in Transition, 1845-1860 is a wonderful resource to consult for more information on Tefft’s short but astonishingly creative career.
RISD’s Memorial Hall. Image: Wikimedia Commons
Brown University Library Digital Collections are a rich resource for historical photographs. The collection Images of Brown contains over 4,000 digital objects alone, with more being added all the time. This collection contains many historical photographs of the campus, but also of the surrounding neighborhood of College Hill (upon which the University sits). The WhatWasThere project allows users to tie historical photographs to Google Street View and makes it possible to envision how your environment looked in the past by fading the photograph in and out. I chose to work with two photographs taken between The John D. Rockefeller Library and the John Hay Library. The photographer in each would have been standing close to the gates to the University looking down College Hill. In the tree lined views, neither library exists. The Hay was completed in 1910, and the “The Rock,” as it is commonly known, wasn’t built until 1964. The first photograph I 
chose to “fade” represents a view looking down College Street, sometime in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The street is deserted but for a solitary figure caught in motion. What is now the RISD College Building can be seen in the distance. The second photograph appears to be slightly more recent, with the addition of tracks in the street for trolley service. A streetcar filled with passengers approaches the east side. Not all opted for public transit on this sun-filled day; several men in bowlers and boys can be seen walking (even running) up the hill. A dog seems to be accompanying them on the trek (click images for zoomable views.) The interactivity which comes from being able to fade historical photographs from a past era to the present illuminates the past, sparks our imagination, and prompts us to see our daily environment us quite differently.
I encourage you browse the Brown Digital Repository for historical photographs, and to also find interactive ways to experience them. It’s fun navigating familiar streets as they appeared in the past. We would love to hear from you @BrownCurio if you make a successful fade using an image from Brown’s Digital Collections!
Looking up College Hill from South Main Street, in the winter of 1880.
College Hill seen from the gates of Brown University, 1870
August 21, 2013 by rness | 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:
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
6. United States National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
Capt. Fitzpatrick’s effeminate frills and powered wig with a large club of hair attached would have clearly marked him as a macaroni.
July 17, 2013 by rness | Comments Off on Total Eclipse of the Sun
The solar eclipse expedition team readies equipment on the steps of the Ladd Observatory before departing to Sweden
Charles H. Smiley was a professor of Astronomy and director of Ladd Observatory at Brown University from 1938 -70. During his career, he led fourteen solar eclipse expeditions to far flung locations around the world. Many of these expeditions are documented in scrapbooks and can be viewed in the Brown Digital Repository. The scrapbooks serve as part astronomical log recording scientific data, part photo album, and part travelogue. The Smileys, along with their good friends and colleagues, the Reeds, were fastidious in their collecting of materials for inclusion in the scrapbooks. Everything from cocktail receipts to diplomatic correspondence were carefully pasted into place.
Processing the page images from the scrapbook labeled Sweden was of particular interest to me, having lived for a time in Västergötland myself. The scrapbook documents an astronomical expedition to record the total eclipse of the sun on June 30, 1954. Brown University sent teams to Canada, Pakistan, and Sweden to record the eclipse. An Eastman Kodak executive and two Brown students made up the Canadian team. Charles H. Smiley traveled to Pakistan with Brown Grad student Lt. Somachai Chansuvan, while Smiley’s wife Margaret, along with Mary Quirk ’22, Constance Herlihy Reed ’34, and Donald S. Reed traveled to Sweden, the key point for observations. The scrapbook tells the chronological tale of the trip through ephemera, photographs, postcards, Swedish and American newspaper clippings, letters, and reports on the expedition, all providing a portrait of mid-century travel to Sweden.
Kungsportsplatsen, Gothenburg
The expedition team arrived in Gothenburg on May 21st, where they spent some time sightseeing. In early June, the party departed from their lodgings at The Place Hotel, after loading all matter of astronomical equipment onto the roof of a red VW bus, and traveled inland to Småland. The group stayed at Sunds Herrgard, a lake country estate, and searched for the best site to observe the eclipse. Once the site, in a nearby rye field, was decided upon, local farmers helped to construct a cement pier and platform on which to mount the photo-theodolite
Constance Reed using the photo-theodolite
(an optical tracking instrument consisting of a camera and theodolite a singletripod). An emergency trip to Jönköping was made for parts when it was discovered that the theodolite had sustained damage during the transatlantic crossing. Sadly, on June 30th bands of clouds crossed the blue skies and the team were unable to capture any images of the eclipse. Mrs. Smiley’s cablegram to the public relations director at Brown summed up the expedition’s observations in one word…”clouds”. The islands of Öland and Gotland turned out to be the best Swedish observation points. For the Canadian team, and back in Providence, the whole event was hidden under cloud cover. All was not lost, however; Charles Smiley’s cablegram from Pakistan cheerfully read “Complete success. Cloudless skies. Photos to be developed soon. Prime Minister Present.”
Once the eclipse was over, the Swedish group once again became tourists and headed to Stockholm and environs, visiting Gamla Stan, glass blowing facilities, medieval castles, the open air museum Skansen, and the Saltsjöbaden Observatory, naturligtvis.
Skansen Museum & Zoo, Stockholm
Saltsjöbaden Observatory