Battle of Monmouth

Today marks the anniversary of the Battle of Monmouth, a fact which came to my mind as I was looking at nearby New Jersey sites for a summer camping trip. The battle on June 28, 1778 was the first major engagement after the Continental Army's winter at Valley Forge, and it was fought under weather conditions much like the ones we'll have this weekend--both sides suffered many casualties from heat stroke, in addition to those felled by combat. 

The Rosenbach has a very interesting document relating to the battle: an eyewitness account of the actions of Major General Charles Lee, Washington's most senior general at the battle. Lee failed to move decisively against the British at the start of the engagement and then ordered a retreat. His troops ran into Washington's advancing troops; Washington publicly criticized his actions and re-formed his men. An angry Lee demanded an apology from Washington and a court-martial to clear his name. He would be convicted of disobeying orders and insubordination and removed from the army for a year.

The Rosenbach letter is to Lee from John Clark, a major and auditor of accounts for the army, who was at the battle. It  is clearly a response to a request by Lee for Clark's account of the events. It was written after the July-August court martial, but may possibly have been requested as part of Lee's attempt to get Congress to overturn the conviction.

John Clark, autograph letter signed [draft]  to Charles Lee. Philadelphia, 3 September 1778. Rosenbach Museum & Library AMs 785/15

According to Clark's statement, Washington asked Clark to "inform General Lee that 'tis my Orders he annoy the enemy as much as in his power, but at the same time, proceed with caution and take care the enemy don't draw him into a scrape, that I have information that the Enemy's rear have left Monmouth, have ordered the Troops with me to throw of their Packs and will march on to reinforce him”

Clark  "delivered the above orders to him, which I did & still do conceive to be discretionary and as such he received them as he replied, I give you my word I shall not advance a foot further, my men are fatigued excessively and it would be sacrificing them to pursue: they reconnoitered the enemy found them forming a line of Battle with the cavalry on their right returned & gave the Gen information."

Lee then asked Clark to help lead the men over a morass. When they came under attack from the British, Lee ordered the troops to form along a fence, but one of his subordinates, Col. Jackson, replied “his men were too fatigued they could not form.”

Clark relates what happened next: "in a few minutes after I observed those troops marching from the fence, upon which Gen Lee asked the officers the reason, they said Col. Jackson ordered them. The Gen'l was much enraged, rode forward to the Col & told him he (Gen'l Lee) was the commanding officer & no one else shou'd give orders & drew his sword, the Colonel apologized & I parted with the General, having first requested that I would inform his Excellency [George Washington] that by too much precipitancy in one of his Brigadiers and false intelligence his Troops were thrown into confusion & that he was retiring..."

Ultimately Congress upheld the court-martial's verdict. Lee returned home to Virginia, where he began a smear campaign against Washington; he was ultimately dismissed from the army in 1780. He would die in Philadelphia in 1782. His will stated that he should not be buried in a churchyard, since " “I have kept so much bad company when living that I do not choose to continue it when dead.” but he was in fact buried in the graveyard at Christ Church.

Kathy Haas is the Assistant Curator at the Rosenbach Museum & Library and the primary poster at the Rosen-blog

 

Death of General Wolfe

Before we dive into this week's blog post, first a big thank you to everyone who attended or assisted with this year's Bloomsday. Also, a big thank you to the weather gods--can we order up another picture-perfect day for next year, please? We considered writing a Bloomsday wrap-up post for the blog this week, but we couldn't do better than Frank Delaney's lovely tribute, so just go read his. 

Instead, we offer another trip through the collections with our intrepid intern Anna Juliar

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While digging through a folder in collections storage a few weeks ago, I found a print that looked very familiar to me:

Luigi Schiavonneti, after intaglio gem by Nathaniel Marchant, The Death of General Wolfe. c. 1790-1810, stipple engraving. Rosenbach Museum & Library, 1954.1591

This scene depicts the death of British General James Wolfe. The only reason I knew this immediately is that it is derived from the very famous painting The Death of General Wolfe by Benjamin West, which can be found in nearly all art history text books. Benjamin West actually painted quite a few versions of this painting, but the original is at the National Gallery of Canada.

The story behind the painting goes as follows:

During the 1759 Battle of Quebec of the French and Indian War, the British General James Wolfe suffered a mortal wound. He lay dying, surrounded by his officers, as news broke that his army had won the battle. His courageous victory and death secured a place for him as a martyr in the pantheon of British war heroes. 

Eleven years later, Benjamin West secured his own fame as the preeminent painter of the 18^th century with his painting The Death of General Wolfe. In his moving portrayal of Wolfe’s last moments, West painted a Christ-like General Wolfe expiring before his trusted comrades, who look on in various expressions of grief. The painting was exhibited in the 1771 Royal Academy exhibition in London, and is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. The painting was an immediate success, and is often used by teachers and scholars as the epitome of grand history painting in the Neoclassical style. 

The discovery of the print in our collection led me to research the lesser-known second life of this iconic image. The image’s true claim to fame, in fact, was actually the immense popularity of prints produced after the painting. Only a year after the painting was exhibited, the enterprising publisher John Boydell signed an agreement with engravers William Woollett and William Ryland to publish a print after the painting, along with a key that identified six of the men in the foreground, in cooperation with West. Finished in 1776, it was an instant success. Woollett’s engravings netted a spectacular profit of over 15,000 pounds by 1790. This print was truly England’s first widely successful reproductive print:

William Woollett, The Death of General Wolfe. engraving. 1776

Library of Congress, Division of Prints and Photographs

Prints after this painting generated a completely new popular taste and market for historical pictures. Middle class people could purchase them to hang in their parlors and sitting rooms, while shops, inns, and restaurants displayed them on the walls. Prints after West’s composition traveled to France, Germany, and America. While Woollett continued to pull prints from the original plate for a long time, many other copies and interpretations (including counterfeit prints) sprang up in England and abroad. The Death of General Wolfe graced needlepoints, teapots, trays, ceramic ware, and carved gems.
 

The image retained its power during the Revolutionary War. In fact, both the British and Americans used the scene to support their own causes! Each side felt that Wolfe would have supported their own causes, if he were still alive. 

Let’s get back to our print:

Luigi Schiavonneti, after intaglio gem by Nathaniel Marchant, The Death of General Wolfe. c. 1790-1810, stipple engraving. Rosenbach Museum & Library, 1954.1591

In 1790, a British gem collector commissioned Nathanial Marchant, a well-known gem carver, to create an intaglio depicting the death of General Wolfe. The gem was then reproduced by the engraver Luigi Schiavonetti. Because he typically re-created scenes from Classical antiquity, Marchant took generous artistic license and crafted a scaled-down version of the foreground scene in West’s painting. He depicted the heroic general shirtless, muscular, and much more conscious than the Wolfe of West’s painting. He moved the Native American figure from the outskirts of West’s scene to the foreground of the composition. Similarly muscular and draped in a swathe of fabric, the Native American points to the left, like the soldier behind him, locking eyes with the General to indicate Wolfe’s victory in death. 

Residing the in same collections folder was yet another version of the scene:

George B. Ellis, engraved title page for The History of England by Tobias Smollet.  Philadelphia: M. Polock, 1854. Rosenbach Museum & Library, 1954.1591

For the title page of an 1854 edition of The History of England by Tobias Smollett, George B. Ellis engraved his own version of the famous image. Enclosing the central scene of Wolfe’s death within an elaborate gothic frame, Ellis remained faithful to many of the compositional elements by simply cropping the picture’s left half. The kneeling Native American to the left barely made the cut, and Ellis simplified the composition by eliminated the battle raging behind the scene and including a swirling mass of smoke behind the flag. Credit is still given to Benjamin West in a tiny tag line to the bottom left of the image.

Anna Juliar is a Ph.D. student in Art History at the University of Delaware and a collections department intern at the Rosenbach Museum & Library 

Silhouettes

It seems slightly sacrilegious to post on a non-Joycean topic right before Bloomsday, but we wanted to highlight some of the research our collections intern Anna Juliar has been doing. James Joyce did write a group of  (now lost) short sketches called Silhouettes circa 1897, so, as with all things, there is some Joycean connection. Enjoy!

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Who remembers having their silhouette cut by a person, or even produced by a machine? I’ve never had a silhouette taken, but some of my friends remember having them cut at fairs or at birthday parties as children. Here at the Rosenbach we have quite a few silhouettes from the 19^th century, some cut by hand and some produced by a machine with a really fun-sounding name, the “Physiognotrace.”

Silhouette of Archibald Robertson. c. 1800-1825. Rosenbach Museum & Library, 1954.0285

The word silhouette has a surprisingly negative origin. During the 18^th century, the very unpopular finance minister Étienne de Silhouette served King Louis VX. He lasted only eight months in his position, and soon afterwards anything cheap or miserly was called “à la Silhouette.”

The profile portrait, on the other hand, became very fashionable in Europe and American during the late 18^th to mid 19^th centuries. Spurred by the popular “science” of Physiognomy (the belief that a person’s face contained evidence of moral and spiritual character), silhouettes were cheap, quickly made, and easily mass-produced.

Samuel Metford, silhouette of Noah Webster. 1842. Rosenbach Museum & Library, 1966.0011

Traditional silhouettists cut a piece of paper with a small pair of scissors while looking at a sitter’s profile, and mounted the paper on a background. A number of people still practice this craft today, and you can see a video of silhouette cutter Karl Johnson here. This was a demo for Martha Stewart’s show, and you can see how quickly he can capture the little girl’s likeness, even as she is (very cutely) fidgeting on her chair.

Machine-made silhouettes were produced by devices that traced a person's profile with a metal point, and simultaneously reduced the image, which was then cut away. The paper was often folded twice, resulting in the creation of four identical silhouettes. Invented in France in 1789, the silhouette machine was developed by many others and existed under a variety of names. Try saying these several times fast: Ediograph, Limomachia, Pasigraph, Prosopographus, Profileograph, Proportionometer.

Here in Philadelphia, the most famous machine resided in Charles Willson Peale’s Museum. Operated for ten years by Peale’s former slave, Moses Williams, Peale’s Physiognotrace was all the rage for the first decade of the 19^th century. In 1803 alone, Williams cut 8,880 profiles. It remained a popular attraction until the rise of photography in the 1840s.

Peale Museum Silhouette. 19th century. Rosenbach Museum & Library, 1954.0928 

Silhouettes were given or exchanged to further cement social relationships, similarly to the action of “friending” someone on Facebook today. Some silhouettes were mounted and framed; others were simply slipped into the family bible or another favorite book. Interestingly, the majority of silhouette albums produced in Philadelphia were created by Quakers seeking to literally bind their community together.

Peale Museum Silhouette of Margaret Vaux. 19th century. Rosenbach Museum & Library, 1954.0929

This silhouette bears the Peale Museum stamp, and probably depicts Margaret Vaux of the Quaker Vaux family

Generally speaking, silhouettes were exchanged and traded among family members and friends. Unlike painted portraits, the silhouette was an intimate art form that was easily recognizable to acquaintances of the sitter, but was not specific enough for a stranger to identify. Silhouettes were plain, “blank” constructions of sitters which viewers could mentally fill in with all of the subject’s details absent on the actual paper.

Today, just as digital tools and apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic make digital photographs appear
“vintage,” silhouettes are experiencing a small resurgence. A few weeks ago I walked by a fine paper store on Walnut Street and saw this in the shop window:

                    

Anna Juliar is a Ph.D. student in Art History at the University of Delaware and a collections department intern at the Rosenbach Museum & Library

Get Ready to Re-Joyce

I can't believe it, but Bloomsday is a week from tomorrow! The entrance of Ulysses into the public domain in much of the world lends an especially festive air to the proceedings this year, while here at the Rosenbach we are celebrating our twentieth Bloomsday. Do you have your hat picked out? Do you know which Ulysses character you most resemble?

A few quick reminders. First of all, whether you are in Philadelphia, Paris, or Parana, you can find out about Bloomsday activities near you on our Bloomsday Central website. New listings have been coming in fast and furious, so take a look.

Second, while Bloomsday itself is June 16, here at the Rosenbach we'll be celebrating all next week, starting with the Go Ulysses puppet show on Wednesday and  Bloomsday 101 at Fergie's Pub on Thursday. Personally, I'm particularly intrigued by the puppet show--not only are puppets inherently wonderful, but I'd like to see how they condense Ulysses into 30 minutes.

Finally, I'd like to give a quick nod to our neighbors down the street at Plays & Players, who are performing Tom Stoppard's Travesties from June 7-23. In addition to the play itself, which features heavy doses of Rosenbach favorites James Joyce and Oscar Wilde, they are doing a series of pre- and post-show talks about the play and its subjects, starting with one this evening by former Bloomsday coordinator and Ulysses reading course instructor Janine Utell. The other events are on 6/10, 6/15, and 6/17.

Now, to get everyone warmed up for the pub quiz portion of Bloomsday 101, I thought I'd throw out a little brain teaser of my own. In 1950, a Harvard archaeology professor named Phil Phillips went to Dublin to photograph places mentioned in Ulysses. Here are a few snapshots from his collection--how many do you recognize and where do they turn up in the novel?

Photograph by Philip Phillips. Dublin, 1950. EMs 1330/11. Gift of Sayre P. Sheldon and Lady Richard Davies

 

Photograph by Philip Phillips. Dublin, 1950. EMs 1330/11. Gift of Sayre P. Sheldon and Lady Richard Davies

Photograph by Philip Phillips. Dublin, 1950. EMs 1330/11. Gift of Sayre P. Sheldon and Lady Richard Davies

Photograph by Philip Phillips. Dublin, 1950. EMs 1330/11. Gift of Sayre P. Sheldon and Lady Richard Davies

Happy puzzling!

Kathy Haas is the Assistant Curator at the Rosenbach Museum & Library and the primary poster at the Rosen-blog

Transit of Venus

Next Tuesday evening, there will be a transit of Venus, visible beginning around 6 PM (at least for those of us here in Philly). A transit of Venus means that Venus will pass between the earth and the sun and will be visible as a black dot moving across the sun. These transits are rare, occurring in pairs, over a century apart. The next transit after Tuesday won't be for another 105 years.

Apart from being rare, the transit of Venus has also been historically useful in determining the size of the solar system. In 1716 Edmund Halley suggested that by timing the transit of Venus from different points on earth at different latitudes, observers could work out the solar parallax--the apparent difference in position of the sun from these locations. This would allow them to calculate the distance between the sun and the earth--for more on the science behind this calculation see this helpful page, or this page from NASA.

During the 1761 and 1769 transits, scientist set out on voyages around the globe to take the measurements Halley had suggested. One of these scientists was the French priest Jean-Baptiste Chappe d'Auteroche, who travelled to Tobolsk, Siberia for the 1761 transit. His account of the trip was later published as Voyage en Siberie and illustrated with plates by Jean Baptiste Le Prince and Moreau le Jeune. Le Prince had not traveled with Auteroche, but he had separately lived in Russia for five years between 1758 and 1763.  In addition to a copy of the book, the Rosenbach also owns the original watercolor illustrations, which depict native peoples and scenes of life in Russia.

Jean-Baptiste Le Prince, Danse Russe. 1764. 1954.0387

Jean-Baptiste Le Prince, Kamtchadal dans son Habit De Ceremonie. 1764. 1954.402

Jean-Baptiste Le Prince, Iourte ou Habitation Souterraine des Kamtchadals Pendant L'Hiver. 1766. 1954.397

You can find more of the lovely illustrations in our online object catalog.

Jean-Baptiste Chappe d'Auteroche travelled to the Baja California peninsula for the 1769 transit, but although he made his observations he died there in an epidemic; only one member of his crew made it back to Paris with his notes.

If you would like to learn more about the transit of Venus, and how to observe it for yourself next Tuesday, either outside or via webcast, you can check out transitofvenus.org. Remember to never look at the sun with your naked eye--it can cause serious damage.

Kathy Haas is the Assistant Curator at the Rosenbach Museum & Library and the primary poster at the Rosen-blog