January 2011

On a sweltering Monday afternoon in July, 1834, Edward Cutter of Charlestown, Massachusetts, was startled by the sudden appearance of a woman in his house. Her hair was closely shorn, she was clad only in a flimsy nightdress, and she was muttering incoherently. Cutter probably surmised that she was from the Ursuline convent a few hundred yards up the hill, then known as Mount Benedict.

Sure enough, before long, a carriage was dispatched from the convent and the deranged woman was quietly escorted back there by the mother superior and the Right Reverend Benedict Fenwick, bishop of the Boston diocese.

A great “intensity of thought,” Abraham Lincoln once counseled his friend Joshua Speed, “will some times wear the sweetest idea thread-bare and turn it to the bitterness of death.” No aspect of Lincoln’s character has become more tangibly real in the literature than his melancholy. “No man in this agony,” Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote in 1864 after a visit with the President, “has suffered more and deeper, albeit with a dry, weary, patient pain, that seemed to some like insensibility.” One observer wrote in a letter dated February 25, 1865, that “his face denotes an immense force of resistance and extreme melancholy. It is plain that this man has suffered deeply.” His friend, Ward Hill Lamon, called him a “man of sorrows” who bore “a continued sense of weariness and pain” and attracted universal sympathy “because he seemed at once miserable and kind.” He was, indeed, “the saddest and gloomiest man of his time.” Toward the end of the war the artist Francis B. Carpenter spent about six months in the White House working on a painting of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. After the war Carpenter wrote a detailed memoir of his impressions.

During the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century, the pillows, curtains, hangings, and tassels with which the middle class padded its homes tended to amalgamate into constructions known as “cozy corners.” Built in parlors, they were just that: lavish, intimate little retreats. These particularly fine examples, sent to us by Lynne Marple Cannon of Ambler, Pennsylvania, were photographed by her great-grandfather, Alfred C. Marpie. An avid amateur camerman, he was a furniture salesman, and the cozy corner on the right served as a display in his Philadelphia store. The magnificent rococo specimen with Moorish ordnance and Turk’s head stood in the home of the Marples’ Philadelphia neighbors, the Wrigleys. William Wrigley himself came from that household, and it would be nice to think that the initial idea for his spearmint gum settled on him during a moment of reflection beneath the battle-ax. The occupant in the picture is known to history only as Miss Woodward.

MARY BAKER EDDY: ANOTHER VIEW BELATED MEDALS HISTORIC BUG PATCHWORK PUZZLE

Among the legacies of the Depression are the engaging watercolors of Perkins Harnly, an eighty-two-year-old artist who now lives in California. Struggling to support himself in New York during the bleak thirties, Harnly was lucky enough in 1938 to be assigned by the Federal Arts Project to record exactly what the interiors of Victorian homes and businesses had looked like. The FAP, seeking to employ artists, had established the Index of American Design in 1935; its task was to document the work of craftsmen before mass production rendered their skills obsolete.

Harnly had been raised in Nebraska, where he had been inspired by an architect grandfather who reveled in Victorian ornamentation—”copious gingerbread and endless gewgaws.” All that “heavenly architecture” left a strong impression on him and was ideal preparation for painting the jumbled, stuffed spaces of Victorian life. Harnly researched and composed twenty-five precise, witty paintings in all.

TWO GREAT nineteenth-century inventions can teach us some surprising things about the kind of creative thought that goes into major technological change.

Both the steamboat and the electromagnetic telegraph were truly something new under the sun; and while every invention has many parents, Robert Fulton emerges as the designer of the boat that signaled the beginning of the age of engine-powered transportation. And Samuel F. B. Morse was clearly the leading contriver of the form of telegraph that came to dominate the non-British world.

It turns out to be no mere coincidence that both men were trained artists who had expected to make painting their lifework.

“WE’RE USED to living around ‘em. You Northerners aren’t. You don’t know anything about ‘em.” This is or was the all-purpose utterance of white Southerners about blacks. Everybody from Jefferson Davis to Strom Thurmond said it, in some version, at one time or another. Turned on its obverse, the old saw means, “You can’t know how bad they are. ” Or conversely, “You can’t imagine how deeply we understand them.” This racial intimacy has served as the explanation of everything from lynch mobs to the recent and comparatively peaceful integration of Southern schools, accomplished while Boston and Detroit sometimes literally went up in flames.