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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

After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World

Tue, Nov 8, 2005

The distinguished historian A.N. Wilson charts Britain's rise to world dominance. In his much anticipated sequel to the classic *The Victorians*, he describes how, in little more than a generation, Britain's power and influence in the world virtually dissolved. Wilson presents a panoramic view of an era, stretching from the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, to the dawn of the Cold War in the early 1950s. He offers riveting accounts of the savagery of World War I and the world-altering upheaval of the Communist Revolution and explains Britain's role in shaping the destiny of the Middle East, casting a new light on the World War II years. Wilson's perspective is not confined to the trenches of the battlefield and the halls of parliament: he also examines the parallel story of the beginnings of Modernism, looking at novelists, philosophers, poets, and painters to see what they reveal about the activities of the politicians, scientists, and generals. Blending military, political, social, and cultural history, A.N. Wilson offers an absorbing portrait of the decline of one of the world's great powers.

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Burying Sir Joshua Reynolds

Tue, Sep 27, 2005

Richard Wendorf discusses his new book on British art in the 18th and 19th centuries, an experiment in cultural history that combines analysis of specific artistic objects with an exploration of the cultural conditions in which they were created. In a lecture titled "After Sir Joshua" presented at the Athenæum eight years ago, Richard Wendorf investigated Sir Joshua Reynolds' legacy among the biographers, painters, and writers who followed him. In "Burying Sir Joshua," Wendorf provides an illustrated analysis of the various cultural factors that made the preparation for Reynolds' funeral in 1792 so difficult. Drawing on rarely seen archival material in the Hyde Collection at the Houghton Library, Wendorf charts the day-by-day events involving not only the recently deceased first president of the Royal Academy, but the artist Benjamin West, the architect Sir William Chambers, and the politician and writer Edmund Burke as well. "Burying Sir Joshua" is the final Athenæum lecture based on Wendorf's new book, *After Sir Joshua: Essays on British Art and Cultural History*.

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North Shore Boston: Country Houses of Essex County

Tue, Oct 4, 2005

Pamela Wilkinson Fox discusses more than 50 great houses in Boston's North Shore, designed by such architects as McKim, Mead & White, the Olmsted Brothers, Peabody & Stearns, and Ogden Codman. Since the mid-19th century, well-to-do Bostonians have fled the sweltering city streets for the cooling breezes, gently rolling hills, and rugged coastline of the fabled North Shore. From prestigious seaside communities such as Nahant, Marblehead, and Prides' Crossing to inland villages such as Wenham, Topsfield, and Ipswich, elegant country mansions arose, growing ever grander and more elaborate as the Age of Elegance progressed. Exclusive enclaves such as the Myopia Hunt Club, Eastern Yacht Club, and the Essex Country Club endowed the North Shore with a summer playground where Boston Brahmins mingled with Midwestern moguls (Henry Clay Frick, Richard Crane, and Edwin Swift), US Presidents (William Howard Taft and Calvin Coolidge), and artists and authors, including Maxfield Parrish, Edward Hopper, and Rudyard Kipling.

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William John Bankes: The Exiled Collector

Thu, Oct 6, 2005

Anne Sebba discusses her new book about William John Bankes, The Exiled Collector. William John Bankes was a former Tory MP, pioneer Egyptologist, renowned traveler, and consummate collector. A prominent figure in early Victorian Britain and friend to both Byron and the Duke of Wellington, Bankes was forced to flee Britain in 1841 and settled in Venice. He lost his possessions and property to the authorities, but unable to let his standing as an outlaw interfere with his affection for his prior estate, Bankes continued to decorate his beloved home and assemble his extraordinary collection. He collected obsessively for the house that he no longer owned, sending art, sculpture by Carlo Marochetti, huge quantities of marble, gilding, leatherwork, and Pietra Dura to the estate, which he visited in secret near the end of his life. Ms. Sebba recants the dramatic events in William Bankes' life, using previously unpublished archives, and examining the psychology of collecting as well as the pain and creativity of exile.

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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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