January 2011

As a child he sketched horses and wagons, buggies, boats, and scenes described in history lessons; during sermons in church he used the pages of prayer books and hymnals to draw the angels and the Giants in the Earth of the preacher’s text. So began the career of one of America’s most prolific genre painters—Edward Lamson Henry.

Henry was born in 1841 at Charleston, South Carolina; in 1848, having lost both parents, he went to New York to live with cousins. Apparently his adopted family was well-off and encouraged his artistic leanings; when he was in his late teens, they sent him to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In 1860, already having exhibited at the National Academy of Design, he went to Europe to study in Paris and travel through the Continent, keeping extensive illustrated diaries. Back in New York he worked as a professional artist until 1864, when he volunteered for the Union army. After the war he rapidly achieved artistic success and popularity that lasted until his death in 1919.

The self-portrait of Theodore Gentilz that opens the portfolio of his work in the October, 1974, issue, is incorrectly credited. The credit should read “Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library, San Antonio.”

We have come to grief on our foray outside the boundaries of the continental United States. A number of readers have pointed out that on the map of the Trans-Siberian railroad that appeared on page 13 of our August, 1974, issue, we have located Korea on the Kamchatka Peninsula, a good sixteen hundred miles north of where it actually is. And on the same page the date we give as August a, 1919, should read August 2, 1918.

The two Van Rensselaers shown on page 97 of our October, 1974, issue are erroneously identified. William Patterson is on the right and Stephen iv on the left, rather than the other way around.

Professor Laurence Senelick of Tufts University writes: The information in your August, 1974, issue that an American version of Burke’s Peerage is forthcoming reminded me of an earlier British jibe at Yankee genealogy. In one of its many fulminations against the “Newgate novel” Fraser’s Magazine for April, 1836, set forth a tongue-in-cheek explanation of the American market for tales of crime: “Any one initiated into the secrets of the book-trade must be aware that copies of the Newgate Calendar are in constant and steady request through President Jackson’s dominions; most families being anxious to possess that work from motives connected with heraldry and genealogical science. It is the same pardonable weakness that secures among us the sale of Mr. Burke’s Peerage and Commoners ”

As a sort of bleak handmaiden to the article on federal bureaucracy in our August, 1974, issue, we would like to reveal the results of a recent survey undertaken by the Agriculture Department. With admirable thoroughness the department interviewed more than two thousand mothers with children under fourteen years of age in order to determine whether the mothers preferred children’s clothing that requires no ironing to clothing that does need to be ironed. The conclusion, published in a 113-page research report entitled “Mothers’ Attitudes Toward Cotton and Other Fibers in Children’s Lightweight Clothing,” is: yes indeed, mothers do prefer children’s clothes that don’t need ironing. This none-too-startling revelation cost the taxpayer $113,147.

The eloquent drawings that make up The American Heritage Century Collection of Civil War Art , a few of which we ran in our October, 1974, issue, are currently on tour around the country, in a travelling exhibition organized under the auspices of the International Exhibitions Foundation. The exhibition opened in January at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The following itinerary lists additional museums where the drawings may be seen:

February 15-March 15:

Brooks Memorial Art Gallery, Memphis, Tennessee.

April 1-June 15:

Museum of Our National Heritage, Lexington, Massachusetts.

July 1-July 31:

The Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, Golumbus, Ohio.

August 15-September 15:

Putnam Museum, Davenport, Iowa.

October 1-October 31:

Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansas.