The Ecology of Culture in Pre-Civil War Providence
Nancy Austin, Ph.D., independent scholar
AustinAlchemy.com
c. 1859 Panoramic Photograph of the Coliseum in Rome, attributed to Tommaso Cuccioni.
Collection of the Providence Athenaeum. Gift of Albert Jenkins Jones, 1860.
The Providence Athenaeum recently rediscovered a five-foot wide, panoramic photograph of the Coliseum in Rome that was taken 150 years ago by the most famous Italian architectural photographer of the day, (d.1864). Cuccioni was especially noted for his exceptional large-format photographs and exhibited these at an early and important 1859 exhibition of art photography in Paris, held alongside the official Salon. This very contemporary photograph was sent from Italy to the Providence Athenaeum in 1860 by Benefit Street expatriate Albert Jenkins Jones (1821-1887), and was displayed for many years hanging in the main gallery of the library. It was rediscovered in remote storage in May 2010 by Archivist Catherine Wodehouse as she set about moving some of the library’s rich archival treasures into a new, modern storage facility.
Today, Albert Jones is best remembered for the posthumous “Jones Bequest” that helped found the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Museum of Art in the 1890s. Rediscovering Jones’s 1860 gift allows us to look again at the dawn of the art world in Providence during those fervent seven years before the Civil War. Within this rich ecology of culture we find advocates, like Albert Jones, of an American culture based on the ongoing relevance of the classical tradition as the most apt expression of Republican virtue. Also contributing alongside Jones were other committed leaders of the Rhode Island Art Association (founded 1853), who felt the first priority should be to collect contemporary American landscape painting for a future public museum. In the mid-1850s, some members of the Rhode Island Art Association (RIAA) organized the first major art exhibition ever held in Providence, and others began collecting for the planned museum with the purchase of Chocorua Peak (1855) by the famous Hudson River painter, Asher B. Durand (1796-1886). This painting can still be seen at the RISD, Museum of Art.
Still other members of the RIAA diplomatically fought through the 1850s to establish a design school for women in Rhode Island, in support of that branch of the women’s movement more concerned with employment for women, than suffrage. This conversation was broadcast nationally in the pages of the radical and first feminist newspaper in America, The Una, written and published in Providence from February 1853 to January 1855 by Paulina Wright Davis.
Perspective for The Merchants’ Exchange, 1856 by Thomas Tefft (1826-1859).
Thomas Alexander Tefft architectural drawings, MS-1U-T3, Brown University Archives.
By permission of the John Hay Library, Brown University.
Also pushing the envelope was the brilliant young architect and critical RIAA advocate, Thomas Tefft, who hoped his mercantile clients would embrace visionary architecture for downtown Providence. Tefft’s clients initially supported but later abandoned his design for the Merchants’ Exchange of 1856, a five-story, freestanding circular office building planned to stand in front of the Arcade, on the site of the current Turks head building. (Illustrated above and below.) This remarkable Merchants’ Exchange proposal was Tefft’s last major design before he left for a planned three-year trip to Europe, from December 1856 to 1859. It was likely during this trip that Albert Jones and Thomas Tefft together bought the Providence Athenaeum’s Coliseum photograph from Cuccioni’s studio in Rome while they both were in Rome and Florence during most of 1859, and before Tefft’s unexpected and tragic death of fever on December 11, 1859 – in Jones’s arms. (Tefft’s body was shipped back to RI and interred in Swan Point cemetery in May 1860.)
Plan and Land Layout for The Merchants’ Exchange, 1856 by Thomas Tefft (1826-1859).
Thomas Alexander Tefft architectural drawings, MS-1U-T3, Brown University Archives.
By permission of the John Hay Library, Brown University.
Meanwhile, the art dealer, Seth Vose, was cultivating an art market in Providence that would have been unexceptional at the time in Boston, Philadelphia or New York. Vose took over his father’s art supply shop on Westminster Street in 1850, but never sold an uncommissioned painting until 1853. Seth Vose continued to personally collect the then-unfashionable French Barbizon painters, despite being unable to sell them until the 1870s. More immediately, Vose achieved success before the Civil War as an advocate of local Rhode Island painters, including members of the so-called Group of 1855.
A new understanding of the public function of Art was being formed in 1850s Rhode Island. Collectively, members of both the Providence Athenaeum and the Franklin Lyceum sought out opportunities to buy art for their semi-public institutions. In 1854, a teenage girl successfully spearheaded a Providence Athenaeum fundraising drive to secure the $1200 needed to purchase the famous miniature painting, The Hours, from the heirs of Newport artist Edward Greene Malbone (1777-1807).
In 1858, when a new statue of Benjamin Franklin was installed in the Westminster St. façade of the Franklin Lyceum, a sculptor could claim: “This is the first public statue in Rhode Island! Let it be but the beginning…” However, after the epic tragedy of the Civil War, the momentum of this period from 1853-1861 was not regained until 1877-80 when the Rhode Island School of Design (1877), the Providence Art Club (1880), and plans for public sculpture for Roger Williams Park (designed 1878) and downtown Providence ushered in a renewed commitment to the hopes first brought to fruit in a younger America.
Cuccioni’s rediscovered photograph will be on view for the month of September 2010 in the Providence Athenaeum’s Philbrick Rare Book Room as the centerpiece of the exhibition, “The Ecology of Culture in Rhode Island - The Providence Athenaeum’s 1859 Coliseum Photograph in Context”.
As the guest curator, I look forward to meeting you at the exhibition opening on Gallery Night, September 16, 2010. Or at one of my informal lunch-hour talks from Noon to 1pm on September 3, 8 & 23, 2010.
Detail of the Time-Exposed Blur of a Horse and Carriage behind the Meta Sudans (fountain).
Photograph of the Coliseum in Rome, attributed to Tommaso Cuccioni, c. 1859.
Collection of the Providence Athenaeum. Gift of Albert Jenkins Jones, 1860.