City and Book V

ighty Americans in the years 1828-1877 were buried in the Swiss-owned so-called 'English' Cemetery in Florence. Many were deeply involved in the Abolition of Slavery. Several were sculptors of note. Several amassed fine libraries in Florence which they then willed to entities in America. See the web essays http://www.florin.ms/americantombs.html and http://www.florin.ms/americanappeal.html. This year we celebrate the 180th anniversary of our monumental cemetery with the fifth City and Book International Conference, 11 October 2008, to be held on the Americans buried in the so-called 'English' Cemetery and their friends. The events will take place at the Lyceum Club, in the Palazzo Giugni, Via degli Alfani 48, next to the University of Florence, and at the 'English Cemetery', with lodging at the Villa Agape (click for maps) for participants.

The conference will be preceded and followed by paper-marbling and book-binding workshops, Wednesday through Friday, 8-10 October 2008, taught by Enrico Giannini, whose family has been marbling paper and binding books in Florence for five generations. The book-binding workshop will be take place at the 'English' Cemetery and in Enrico Giannini's laboratory in Via Velluti, Oltrarno.

We are inviting Florentine publishing houses and others to exhibit a Book Fair at the Lyceum Club. Participants are Leo S. Olschki, Madragora, Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, Le Lettere, Centro Di, MCrae Books.

'And here, among the English tombs / in Tuscan ground we lay her'. On American families buried in two Florentine cemeteries.
Grazia Gobbi Sica, New York University in Florence

'Hiram Powers, Kate Field and the Italian Risorgimento'
Melissa Dabakis, Kenyon College

In the mid-nineteenth century, progressive Americans were doubly engaged with events in Italy and in the United States; one might even conclude that Italy was “in vogue” in liberal elite circles. The Risorgimento, the Italian unification movement, captured the political imaginations of an engaged American citizenry while the growing sectionalism at home propelled many reformers toward the Abolitionist cause. In Florence, the American neoclassical sculptors Hiram Powers and Horatio Greenough, the American journalist Kate Field, the British poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and many other Anglo/Americans openly supported the Italians and their struggle for independence from foreign control. In this paper, I wish to discuss Hiram Powers’s sculptures The Greek Slave and America within this important and often over-looked international context. To progressive political audiences in Italy and in the United States, these sculptures, I shall argue, referenced a range of republican causes: the Greek Wars of Independence, the Italian Risorgimento, and the growing sectional strife of the young American nation.

When the neoclassical sculptor Hiram Powers expatriated to Italy in 1837, he found the Italian peninsula comprised of isolated states under foreign control. During the heady years of 1847 to 1849, Italy, along with France, Germany, and Hungary, participated in revolutionary struggles. Powers and many American expatriate artists, writers and reformers supported Florentine independence from Austrian rule, seeing parallels between the Italian struggle and the founding of their own young republic. In 1847, Powers identified himself as a citizen of the world and proudly proclaimed: “We Italians have been doing something in the way of revolution.” For Powers, his sculptures expressed these new revolutionary ideals. To American audiences, Neoclassicism bespoke notions of liberty, freedom, and republicanism. For Italians, it formed part of a broader cultural discourse that represented a romantic longing for a glorious political past.

His sculpture America, begun in 1848 (marble statue is no longer extant; plaster is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum), was also wedded to both American and Italian republican values. In fact, Powers intended the sculpture as an emblem of the 1848 European revolutions and as a national icon for the U. S. Capitol, selling busts of the sculpture to both American and European patrons. The sculpture demonstrated many changes between 1848 and 1855. Originally she held a liberty cap aloft—a popular republican symbol. “I am making a statue to suit the times,” Powers wrote in 1848. “She is to be the republican Liberty . . . a very radical Liberty.” With the failure of the revolutions in Italy, Powers revised the sculpture to pertain to abolitionism which gained his support in 1854. The final version of the figure stands crowned with a diadem decorated with 13 stars representing the original states in the Union. She steps on a manacle, an emblem of despotism and of slavery, and raises her arm in a posture of address, proclaiming the triumph of national unity and liberty. In the 1850s, thus, the sculpture stood as an allegory for two nations: for Italy, it represented a hopeful beacon of independence and republicanism; for the United States, it served as a reminder of the preciousness of the union in the face of sectional disharmony caused by the “peculiar institution” of slavery.

“The new birth of

Italy

is already the grandest event of the modern period,” Harvard art historian Charles Elliot Norton exclaimed in 1860. The American journalist Kate Field, a resident of Florence between 1859 and 1861, kept an engaged American citizenry informed of the unfolding political events in

Italy

. An authority on the Italian struggle for unification, she witnessed the birth of the independent nation state of Italy in 1860 with King Victor Emmanuelle II at its head while Florence served as the nation’s provisional capital. This paper will bring to light the passionate participation of Hiram Powers, Kate Field, and others in the Anglo/American community in Florence in the political events that dominated Italian history in the mid-nineteenth century.
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Lilian Whiting and Kate Field
Francesca Limberti

Non esiste una biografia ufficiale di Lilian Whiting; poche e a volte controverse notizie sulla sua vita si trovano in certi testi sul New Thought, in alcuni dizionari biografici e, riguardo a specifici episodi, anche in alcuni dei suoi libri. Secondo notizie biografiche più recenti e da quanto riportato nell'articolo commemorativo scritto da William Gardner, (William Gardner, "In Thankfulness for the Life of Lilian Whiting", Nantucket Island, 1942: p. 3.) Lilian Whiting nacque l’11 ottobre del 1847 (data ritrovata anche in un volume della Bibbia appartenuto alla sua famiglia) ad Olcott, nella contea di Niagara, New York. Il suo nome era Lucretia Dow Whiting, unica femmina dei tre figli di Lorenzo Dow Whiting e Lucretia Calistia Clement. L’educazione di Whiting, secondo quanto lei stessa affermava, era iniziata molti anni prima della sua nascita, con Cotton Mather da un lato e il reverendo William Whiting, primo ministro della chiesa Unitaria a Concord nel Massachusetts, dall’altro. Non frequentò nessuna scuola pubblica, i suoi furono insegnanti privati ma soprattutto sua madre e i grandi scrittori presenti nella biblioteca di casa. Morì durante il sonno la notte del 29 aprile 1942 all’hotel Copley-Plaza di Boston, su sua richiesta le sue ceneri riposano accanto a quelle di Kate Field al Mount Auburn Cemetery di Cambridge nel Massachusetts.

There is no official biography of Lilian Whiting, only a few and sometimes rather controversial remarks about her life are to be found in certain parts of New Thought, in some biographical dictionaries and, concerning certain episodes, even in some f her books. According to the more recent biographical notices and those given in the commemorative article written by William Gardner (titled 'In Thankfulness for the Life of Lilian Whiting', Nantucket Island, p. 3). Lilian Whiting was born 11 October 1847 (a date found in the Bible belonging to her family) at Olcott, in Niagora County, New York. Her name was Lucretia Dow Whiting, the only daughter of the three children born to Lorenzo Dow Whiting and Lucretia Calistia Clement. Whiting's education, as she herself said, was begun many years before her birth, with Cotton Mather on one saide and the Rev William Whiting, first minister at the Unitarian Church in Concorde, Massachusetts, on the other. She did not go to any public school, being taught with her brothers privately but above all by her mother and the great writers present in their home library. She died in her sleep the night of 29 April 1942 at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston. At her request her aches lie by those of Kate Field in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Il primo periodo della sua vita è contrassegnato da una intensa attività giornalistica; collaborò per riviste famose e fu proprio per un incarico ricevuto dal direttore del Boston Traveler, che nel 1880 per la prima volta incontrò Kate Field e la intervistò. Ne nacque una empatia destinata non solo a dar luogo alla biografia di Field ma anche a After Her Death. The Story of a Summer (1897). Proprio in questo lavoro vengono descritte le esperienze psichiche che portarono Whiting a contatto con i fenomeni dello spiritualismo.

The first period of her life was marked by intense journalistic activity; she worked for leading journals and it was on an assignment from the editor fo the Boston Traveler, that in 1880 she met Kate Field for the first time and interviewed her. From this was born the closeness that was not only to become the biography of Field but also After Her Death. The Story of a Summer (1897). It was this work that described the psychic expereinces that brought Whiting in contact with Spiritualism.

Negli anni '90 l’Europa attenuò l'estasi di Whiting per Boston. Iniziò quindi il suo pellegrinare per l’Europa: da brava e ormai esperta giornalista doveva seguire gli interessi dei suoi lettori. Il primo viaggio fu l’inizio di una serie annuale di traversate: soggiornava d’estate in Italia (per brevi periodi anche in Francia o Inghilterra) e in inverno a Boston. Firenze divenne la meta principale./1 Nella sua immaginazione il soggiorno fiorentino era ambientato intorno al 1860 con il famoso gruppo letterario che godeva dell’ospitalità offerta dai Trollope. Firenze rappresentò la sua nuova musa ispiratrice e The Life and Poetry of Mrs Browning (1898), (1905), The Florence of LandorThe Brownings: Their Life and Art (1911), sono vividi ritratti dell’impulso che l’Italia aveva dato a letterati e artisti negli anni ‘60 e ’70. Soprattutto in The Florence of Landor Whiting trasporta continuamente il lettore dal presente al passato, un richiamo continuo agli anni trascorsi e dei quali, dopo molto tempo, lei continuava a percepire un forte magnetismo. Più volte la stessa Whiting affermava di aver vissuto Firenze come una atmosfera piuttosto che come una città.

In the 90s Europe weakened Whiting's ecstasy for Boston. That was when she began her pilgriamge through Europe: one must follow the interests of her letters penned by a competent and expert journalist. The first voyage became an annual series of crossings: she stayed in the summers in Italy (for brief periods also in France or England) and in winter in Boston. Flroence became her principle goal./1 In her imagination the Florentine stays came to be focussed from 1860 on the famous literary group which enjoyed the hospitality offered by the Trollopes. Florence became her new inspiring muse and The Life and Poetry of Mrs Browning (1898), The Florence of Landor (1905), The Brownings: Their Life and Art (1911), are vivid portraits of the impulse which Italy gave to writers and artists in the '80s and '70s. Above all in The Florence of Landor Whiting brings the reader of the present into the past, a continuing recall through the years when she lived in Florence more as an atmosphere than as a city.

Dei soggiorni a Firenze di Lilian Whiting, che con varie interruzioni si protrassero per quasi trenta anni, sembrano esser rimaste poche tracce, sebbene gli elenchi degli stranieri a Firenze sul settimanale The Italian Gazette e la sua firma riportata più volte sui libri dei soci del Vieusseux ci diano una indicazione abbastanza precisa della sua permanenza nel capoluogo toscano e delle abitazioni nelle quali dimorava. A partire dal 29 agosto del 1898 fino al gennaio del 1925 sappiamo sicuramente che, con interruzioni anche di diversi mesi, quasi ogni anno e soprattutto nei periodi invernali soggiornava a Firenze. Il periodo più lungo nel quale probabilmente non viaggiò fu durante la prima guerra mondiale. Dopo febbraio 1914 ritroviamo la sua firma per l'accesso al Vieusseux nel gennaio del 1922 (stranamente Whiting firmò per errore con data dicembre 1922). Fino al 1908 alloggiò al villino Trollope, poi fino agli ultimi soggiorni all'hotel Florence Washington./2

Of Lilian Whiting's stays in Florence with various interruptions that dragged out to some thirty years, there seem to be few traces, apart from the list of foreigners in Flroence in the weekly Italian Gazzette and her signature sometimes in the books as a reader in the Gabinetto Vieusseux library that give enough of a precise indication of her stays in the Tuscan capital and of the places where she lived. From 29 August 1898 to January 1925 we know for certain that, with interruptions of some months, almost every year and above all in the winters she stayed in Florence. The longest period when she did not make the journey was during the First World War. After February 1914 we find her signature again at the Vieusseux until January of 1922 (strangely Whiting signed the date as December 1922). Until 1908 she stayed at the Villino Trollope, then until her last stays at the Flroence Washington Hotel.

La tomba di Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) e lo spirito di Kate Field (1838-1896) formarono con Whiting un triangolo mistico, simbolo di una tradizione che negli anni precedenti aveva riunito intorno ai Browning molti anglo-americani interessati allo spiritualismo. Quella che legò Field e Whiting, fu una amicizia che da sempre si era configurata come “celestiale”. Fin dall'infanzia Whiting aveva percepito la sua influenza, probabilmente dai racconti che sentiva dalla madre./3 Whiting era attratta dall’energia spirituale di Field prima ancora di conoscerla, esaltava la capacità che la sua mente aveva di dominare il corpo. Entrambe erano sicuramente affascinate dal potere del mondo invisibile e dalle scienze psichiche, credevano nell’esistenza di una vita spirituale e nell’immortalità.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's tomb and Kate Field's spirit formed with Whiting a mystic triangle, symbol of a tradition which in the preceding years had gathered about the Brownings many Anglo-Americans interested in Spiritualism. What bonded Field and Whiting was a friendship that they always considered to be 'celestial'. From childhood Whiting had felt this influence, probably from the tales which she heard from her mother./3 Whtiing was drawn to Field's spiritual energy before she knew her, exalting in her capacity to have her mind dominate over her body. Both were fascinated by the power of the invisible world and by psychic science, believing in the existence of a spiritual life and in immortality.

Attraverso gli scritti di Whiting si percepisce la forza del loro legame e l'amore che entrambe provavano per Firenze, la città che riuscì ad unire per l'eternità le loro anime, a fondere il passato con il presente.

Through Whiting's writings one can perceive the strenght of their bonding and the love that both of them had for Florence, the city which succeeded in uniting their souls for eternity, basing the past in the present.
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1 Margaret Fuller paragonava Firenze (vi arrivò nel 1849) più a Boston che alle altre città italiane. Artom Treves nel suo testo sottolinea come allora il New England e Boston in particolare fossero considerate, almeno da chi ci viveva, come le perle degli Stati Uniti. In Giuliana Artom Treves, Gli Anglo-fiorentini di cento anni fa (Firenze: Sansoni, 1953), pp. 237-38
2 Altre date sui libri dei soci sono: gennaio 1900 (quasi con certezza Whiting iniziò a Firenze il nuovo secolo), maggio 1900, aprile 1905, marzo 1908 e febbraio 1910. Le iscrizioni ai servizi del Vieusseux iniziarono con il pagamento di una settimana e si protrassero fino a due mesi. La costruzione del villino Trollope, dove Whiting dimorò a lungo, fu terminata intorno al 1850 e da allora divenne uno dei luoghi più ospitali di Firenze; era situato in Piazza Maria Antonia divenuta poi Piazza Indipendenza. Thomas Trollope aveva venduto il villino dopo la morte della moglie Theodosia avvenuta nel 1865. Al villino Trollope e ai suoi abitanti è dedicato un capitolo dello studio di Artom Treves, pp. 190-215. Gli anglo-americani permanenti o di passaggio a Firenze, sceglievano con particolare cura la loro dimora, sia che fosse in alberghi, nati quasi esclusivamente per loro, in palazzi antichi e spesso gestiti da compatrioti, oppure in appartamenti quasi sempre presi in affitto. Il "quadrilatero d'oro" della presenza anglo-americana in città spesso coincideva ovviamente con l'area del centro storico, dalla quale era possibile accedere facilmente ad ogni tipo di servizio. Daniela Lamberini ha dedicato un intero capitolo alle residenze di anglo-americani a Firenze nello studio curato da Marcello Fantoni, Gli anglo-americani a Firenze. Idea e costruzione del Rinascimento (Roma: Bulzoni Editore, 2000), pp. 125-40.
3 In una lettera datata 22 agosto 1941 ed indirizzata a William Raymond, Whiting parlava di come già sua madre fosse devota all’Italia e in particolare a Firenze, attribuiva ai racconti materni le prime impressioni ricevute fin da piccola su Field. La notte pregava Dio di far apparire nel buio della sua camera il volto di colei che sarebbe diventata sua guida per l’eternità. Epperly, p. 147.

"Fortunate Associations: The American Painter Amasa Hewins (1795-1855) and Florence."
John F. McGuigan Jr, Independent Scholar

During the course of my extensive, decade-long research into 19th-century American artists working in Italy, the Massachusetts portrait painter and diplomat Amasa Hewins (1795-1855) continues to surprise me, occurring as a curious and fascinating thread woven throughout the rich tapestry of the political and artistic milieu of the era. In many ways, Hewins’ dual careers remind me of James Edward Freeman (1808-84), the New York painter who served as a consul to the Papal States in the 1840s. I am a co-curator, with Mary K. McGuigan and Dr. Paul D. Schweizer, of the forthcoming exhibition on Freeman, “The Life and Art of James E. Freeman, 1808-1884: An American Painter in Italy” (Munson-William-Proctor Arts Institute, Museum of Art, Utica, New York, 12 September 2009-17 January 2010), as well as a co-author, with Mary K. McGuigan, of the attendant exhibition catalogue. As a scholar in the field, I have amassed comprehensive files on Amasa Hewins and his immediate circle, which will be featured in several upcoming catalogues that I am writing with Mary K. McGuigan, including Amor Roma: Reflections on American Plein-Air Painters in Italy, 1828 to 1870; A Harvest on the Campagna: John Gadsby Chapman, a Virginia Painter in 19th-Century Italy; as well as the annotated and edited version of James E. Freeman’s two volumes of memoirs, Gatherings from an Artist’s Portfolio in Rome.

Hewins’ first visit to Florence spanned from 27 December 1830 to 2 September 1832, during which time he was joined by his American colleagues Samuel F. B. Morse (1791-1872), Francis Alexander (1800-80), Thomas Cole (1801-48), Horatio Greenough (1805-52), John Cranch (1807-91) and Henry Greenough (1807-83). The shared experiences of this estimable colony of nascent talent during their idyllic sojourns in Italy constituted a significant formative episode which they cherished for the rest of their lives. In fact, the impact on Hewins was so artistically enriching and life affirming that he determined to return to Florence one day. Although it took him nearly ten years, he finally accomplished this goal, and resided there from November 1841 to the summer of 1842. Ultimately, another decade would pass before his dream of expatriation reached fruition in 1852, when he permanently entrenched himself amid the vibrant international community of artists assembled in his beloved Renaissance city. Though times weren’t always easy, the struggling artist benefited from the advice and influence of his friend, Hiram Powers (1805-73), the leading resident sculptor in Florence. It was on Powers’ recommendation that the U. S. State Department appointed Hewins in 1854 to succeed the cantankerous James Ombrosi (d. 1852) as United States commercial agent to the Government of Tuscany. Tragically, Hewins’ brief diplomatic career ended with his untimely death on 18 August 1855 in the cholera epidemic that claimed the lives of many other prominent Americans and Italians.

Joel Tanner Hart: A Kentucky Sculptor in Florence
David B. Dearinger, Boston Athenaeum

Joel Tanner Hart (1810-1877) was born in rural Kentucky less than two decades after that territory became a state. During his early maturity, he supported himself as a stone mason, bricklayer, and carver of stone and wood. Eventually, he landed a fairly lucrative job in a marble yard in the state’s largest city Lexington, a burgeoning town with at least the early stirrings of a cultural life. But in a type of story often cited, accurately or not, as typically American, Hart had dreams of becoming a professional artist. Finding inspiration and training where he could, he eventually was able to advance himself from his early craftsman status to that of an internationally recognized sculptor.

In 1849, Hart left Kentucky for Florence, primarily to fulfill a commission for a public monument to the American statesman Henry Clay. He immediately became a part of—and eventually a fixture in—the Anglo-American community of expatriate artists and writers there; he lived there the rest of his life. Within a few years, the contemporary press was noting Hart’s participation in the artistic community in Italy and lauding him for his selflessness toward his fellow artists. “Americans [in Florence] have remarked with animated expressions of regard for him,” noted one art journal, “that, insensible of his own merits, his earliest efforts [were] directed to making known the merits of his brother artists, and to putting profitable commissions in their hands.” Meanwhile, Hart himself was achieving some renown for the quality of his portrait busts as well as for his poetry and his experimentations with the sculpting device known as the pointing machine.

Throughout his adult life, however, Hart was plagued with bad health, an inferiority complex, the curse of procrastination, and various personal disasters. His forays into the “higher” forms of sculpture—the more purely neoclassical ideal works with ancient or literary themes—were halting and, in the end, disappointing.

This paper will briefly describe Hart’s connections to and role in the Florentine expatriate community, the professional promise that those connections implied, and the reasons that the potential suggested by his early successes remained unfulfilled. His work for several tombs in the English Cemetery in Florence, the story of his own burial in and eventual removal from that cemetery, as well as his strained relationship with his nephew Robert Hart, who had sculptural aspirations of his own, will also be discussed.

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’Daily Visiting My Studio:’ Joel Tanner Hart and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World
Robert P. Murray, University of Kentucky

Today, Joel Tanner Hart is remembered (if he is at all) as a mid-nineteenth century American expatriate sculptor particularly adept at busts. Like examinations of most artists, biographical accounts of Hart’s life tend toward chronological timelines of his artwork. Hart’s remarkable transition from Kentucky chimney builder to Florentine artist is usually presented with the advantage of hindsight: his brilliance was recognized by wealthy patrons and naturally there was no city on earth better for an aspiring sculptor than Florence. However, it was not so simple. Rather, this paper argues that the peculiarities of Hart’s early patrons—Upper South Whigs—and his upbringing in the transnational world of letters that they crafted provided the necessary tools for this working-class autodidactic artist to relocate across the ocean. Hart then can be conceptualized as a physical embodiment of a larger mid-nineteenth century transatlantic exchange of ideas. Not only did Hart cross the Atlantic numerous times (appropriately, his final trip years after his death when Kentucky reclaimed his body from the English Cemetery in Florence for final internment in the commonwealth), but he maintained a steady correspondence with friends and associates in America. But Hart was not simply a passive vessel floating on this ocean of transatlantic information. He was also a central point of contact within this transnational network as he off-handedly mentioned in an 1858 letter to a friend in Lexington, Kentucky: “A great many Americans and English & c., are daily visiting my studio.”[1] Bringing the interpretive lens to Hart offers the opportunity to examine the personal effects of the nineteenth century’s macro-movements of industrialism, migration, and technological innovations that improved transatlantic communication. Hart rarely enclosed European news in his letters back to America because of these growing transatlantic networks. “I would send you news,” he wrote Louisville’s H. C. Pindell, “but newspapers get ahead of my letters.”[2]

As an exploration of transatlantic connections centered on Joel T. Hart, my paper is heavily indebted to Daniel T. Rodgers’s Atlantic Crossings and the Michael O’Brien’s Conjectures of Orders. However, this case-study of Hart modifies and expands their scholarship. Rodgers argues that New World Exceptionalism structured the American/European relationship as “starkly oppositional” until the last quarter of the century.[3] The arrival of Hart before the American Civil War and the “great many Americans” who daily arrived at his studio suggests that mid-nineteenth century Europe and the United States shared a more complicated relationship than a purely oppositional one. O’Brien’s intellectual history of the American South strikes closer to Hart by exploring the European roots of southern thought and the European travels of well-to-do southerners. O’Brien, however, is primarily interested in the discourse of wealthy merchants and their sons from the Deep South and port cities (Charleston, South Carolina is particularly well represented in his two-volume work). Impoverished Hart with three months of formal education from the Upper South does not fit well into O’Brien’s focus on wayfaring parvenus. An exploration of Joel T. Hart alters Rodgers’s timeline for a nineteenth century Atlantic community while increasing our understanding of the dynamic relationship between Europe and the United States.

[1] Joel Tanner Hart to John S. Wilson, November 28, 1858.

[2] Joel Tanner Hart to H. C. Pendell, November 18, 1867.

[3] Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 34.

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'The Significance of Florence in the Life of William Wetmore Story and his Family'
Kathleen Lawrence, George Washington University

Scholars usually associate nineteenth-century American expatriate sculptor and litterateur William Wetmore Story with Rome where he lived with wife Emelyn, daughter Edith, and sons Waldo and Julian in the Palazzo Barberini from 1856 until his death in 1895, and where he maintained an active studio at 9, Via San Martino. What is less well-known is that Story and his family developed an intimate tie to Florence, first through their close friendship with Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, but later even more significantly through daughter Edith Story’s marriage to Florentine Simone Peruzzi in 1875 and sons Waldo and Julian’s art life in the Florentine circle of painter Frank Duveneck in the 1880’s. Recently discovered unpublished documents and rare photographs in the possession of Story descendants reveal the frequency of the Story visits to Florence and to the Peruzzi family summer villas “Il Lago” in Vallombrosa and “I Busani” in Rufina, in the hills of Florence. Rare photographs also establish the influence of Florentine renaissance masters Desidario da Settignano, Antonio Rossellino, and Mino da Fiesole on the sculpture of Waldo Story, an inspiration no doubt imbibed during son Waldo’s many visits to Florence. Last but not least, son Julian established his painter’s studio in his own villa “Torre di Campiglioni” in Pelago where he lived and entertained international nobility with first wife and famous opera singer Emma Eames and later with second wife Philadelphia socialite Elaine Sartori from the 1890’s until his death in 1917.

With Edith’s marriage to Simone Peruzzi, the Storys formed a bond not only to Florence and the ancient Peruzzi family but also to the Medici, whose title “de Medici” was conferred on the Peruzzis by King Umberto and Queen Margherita in recognition of Simone’s service to the King. Edith’s serene Medici villas in Vallombrosa, Antella, and Rufino drew the family northward every summer to join her, Simone, and sons Bindo, named for a Renaissance Peruzzi ancestor, Ridolfo, named for another ancestor, and daughter Maria Cressida. William Wetmore Story’s enchantment with Vallombrosa culminated in his little volume on the beloved spot where he died in Edith’s arms in 1895. What is not known is that Edith’s son Bindo, the glamorous godson of King Umberto, died tragically by suicide after a lengthy court marshal trial where it was alleged that he had had an affair with another young soldier in the King’s army. His funeral on April 4, 1907 was attended by the nobility of Florence, including Counts Rucellai and Corsini and Marquises Zaccaria and Antinori. Bindo was buried in the Peruzzi/Medici chapel at Rufina. During Bindo’s scandal, only the loyal Pen Browning stood by Edith and continued to visit the family palazzo at 28, Via Maggio. Pen bought Edith’s other villa at Antella in 1901 to rescue her financially to be near her.

Meanwhile, young sculptor Waldo Story developed his own significant relationship to Florence whose renaissance masters became his main influences as he sought to break away from his father’s neoclassicism. Masters Desiderio da Settignano, Antonio Rossellino, and Mino da Fiesole inspired Waldo with their delicacy and refinement and introduced him to the genre of the portrait bas relief, which he began to use for portraits of wealthy society figures in England and America. In addition, Waldo re-invented Desiderio’s tabernacle wall installations to celebrate the lives of distinguished English war heroes in his Portal Monument in Winchester Cathedral. Perhaps most important, Waldo used Medici iconography on his last commission, the exquisite bronze doors of J. P. Morgan’s library in Manhattan, linking Morgan to the great banking families of Florence, and his own style to that of the great Ghiberti.

Julian Story’s life narrative also moved to Florence after his education at Eton and Brasenose College, Oxford, where he used the quiet and beauty of Florence and Vallombrosa first as a training ground with Duveneck and his bride Lizzie Boott and later as a studio and place of inspiration and socialization. Thus in the second generation of the Story family, the saga centers not so much on Rome but on Florence whose beauty and historical significance changed forever the lives of this important American expatriate family and the course of American art.

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A Storied Life: Marble Fauns, Angels, and Cemeteries: William Wetmore Story and Friends in Italy
Elise Madeleine Ciregna, University of Delaware/ Forest Hills Cemetery

The development of American sculpture in the nineteenth century owed a great debt to Italy and that country’s rich artistic heritage. Horatio Greenough, often called “America’s first sculptor” since he was the first American to pursue sculpture exclusively as his career, settled in Florence in the 1830s, to train with Lorenzo Bartolini of the Accademia di Belle Arti, and where Greenough would spend most of the rest of his life. In Florence Greenough became part of the artistic and literary circles that included Samuel F.B. Morse and Thomas Cole. Aspiring American sculptors for the next two generations would follow Greenough’s example, leaving their native country to train and work in Italy, and to become members of the expatriate artistic community.

One of the greatest lights of that community was the sculptor William Wetmore Story. The son of eminent American jurist Joseph Story, William Wetmore Story dutifully, if reluctantly, followed in his father’s footsteps and became a lawyer. But his father’s sudden death in 1845 gave the younger Story an opportunity to follow his artistic leanings. Responding to Mount Auburn Cemetery’s (Cambridge, Massachusetts) search for a sculptor capable of producing a worthy monument to Joseph Story, William Wetmore Story, without any professional experience but with all the right social connections, gained the prestigious commission. Incredibly, recognizing that the aspiring young sculptor would have to actually first learn his craft, the Mount Auburn Committee agreed that Story would close his law practice, move to Italy, and train and work for nearly ten years before expecting a finished product. The Committee was pleased with the statue, delivered in 1854. Thus the career of one of America’s greatest nineteenth century sculptors and one of its most famous expatriates was launched.[1]

Story’s life and career, once based in Italy, did, indeed, become the stuff of fiction. Story’s close friend Nathaniel Hawthorne—a writer who was enamored of Italy and an admirer of stonecutters and sculptors—immortalized Story as the character of Kenyon, the sculptor, in his novel “The Marble Faun.” Story became one of the nineteenth century’s most prolific and successful American sculptors. He lived in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, which was a vibrant center of artistic and intellectual exchange with the many other artists and writers Story knew, among them Elizabeth and Robert Browning, Thomas Crawford, Randolph Rogers, and James Russell Lowell. Many of Story’s most celebrated works were inspired by classical mythology and by figures of the “Antique” world, for example his celebrated statues of Cleopatra and Sappho, regarded as models not only of exquisite workmanship, but as examples of an admirable archaeological attention to authentic detail.

As Story’s first professional sculpture was a tribute to a close family member and destined for placement in a cemetery, it seems fitting that his final major work was also an important cemetery sculpture: The Angel of Grief, created in 1893 for his wife Emelyn’s gravesite in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, and under which Story himself was laid to rest in 1895. The Angel of Grief has proven to be an enduring and resonant work; at least seven copies of it exist in cemeteries across America and elsewhere.

Henry James, an acquaintance of Story’s, would later write a “biography” of William Wetmore Story and his friends. James found Story’s celebrated friends more compelling than Story himself, but in recent years Story has been the subject of critical reevaluation, most notably in the work of art historian Jan Seidler’s as yet unpublished dissertation.[2]

This paper looks at the career of William Wetmore Story and his life in Italy, inextricably linked to the romance of white marble and cemeteries, Italy’s tradition of sculpture and history, and to the artistic and literary expatriates Story counted as friends. William Wetmore Story, regarded as one of nineteenth century America’s greatest sculptors and yet largely ignored after his death, will be restored to his important position within the context of nineteenth century Italy and the artistic community.

[1] Elise Madeleine Ciregna, “Museum in the Garden: Mount Auburn Cemetery and the Development of American Sculpture, 1825-1875.” Master’s Thesis, Harvard University, 2002. Chapter 7 is a critical look at William Wetmore Story.

[2] Jan M. Seidler, “A Critical Reappraisal of the Career of William Wetmore Story (1819-1895), American Sculptor and Man of Letters.” Dissertation, Boston University, 1985.

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IV. American Collectors and Vistors

Albert Jenkins Jones: The New York Times’ Sculpture Critic in Italy, 1860-1876
Nancy Austin, Independent Scholar, http://www.AustinAlchemy.com

Despite his large gestures, Albert Jenkins Jones (1821 RI, USA -1887 Florence) has been left unknown, unacknowledged, and unremembered. This paper seeks to introduce his life and work into scholarly conversations about Florence and the Americans. Where does his story fit into the picture, as we know it?

The self-educated son of a deceased mariner, Albert J. Jones was raised in the working class end of Benefit Street, in Providence, Rhode Island. By the age of twenty, Jones and his brother had opened a shoe store in the new downtown “Arcade”, America’s first enclosed shopping mall. Aspiring to culture and self-education, Jones began borrowing books on art at the Providence Athenaeum. He befriended the young RI architect, Thomas Alexander Tefft, with whom he worked on an early important art exhibition in RI. (Jones was at Tefft’s side when Tefft unexpectedly died in Florence in 1859 at age 33.) In 1854, Jones left RI permanently for Florence “with a valuable library” and went on to become the Italian art critic and war correspondent for The New York Times. In 1883, Albert J. Jones was successful enough to be able to offer a 50-room villa he owned near the Vatican to the US State Department as the future home of a new American Academy in Rome, which Jones was working to help establish. When Jones died, in 1887, his will endowed the American libraries of the Providence Athenaeum, Brown University, and the Providence Public Library with funds for books on industrial or fine art, (funds that continue to purchase books to this day.) Jones’ personal library of over 600 classic books in Italian was left to the Providence Public Library, although the present whereabouts of this collection is unknown.

Albert J. Jones’ most important legacy was the gift of a large bequest that founded the first art museum in RI. However, the Jones Bequest triggered a 4-year lawsuit between the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and the Providence Art Club (surrogate) to see which institution was best suited to take the bequest. Did RISD, as a design school, have as its mission, the support of art? What was the function of an Art Museum for designers? For artists? For the people of Providence? After years of preserved expert testimony, RISD finally won the lawsuit and laid claim to the Jones bequest. (There is, to date, no public awareness or acknowledgement in RI of the pivotal role of the Jones Bequest in the development of that state’s cultural geography.)

My paper for the conference, “Florence and Americans” will serve first as an introduction to a previously unacknowledged player among the expatriates. One would have expected that someone who knew Marsh, and Ruskin, and all of the major and/or up-and-coming sculptors would have left much more of a mark. How to explain this?

Secondly, my identification of his complete body of New York Times criticism gives us another primary source, in context, to mine for gossipy details and larger themes. Jones can be a complement and foil to his better-remembered contemporary critics, like James Jackson Jarves. As a historical actor, Albert J. Jones is an important case study with which to consider the relationship between political activism and art criticism; the homoerotic dimension of neoclassical sculpture and the soldier; the dialogue between American art patrons and Florence as the focus of the art world began shifting to Paris.

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James Lorimer Graham, c. 1832-1876, US Consul in Florence
Jeffrey Begeal, Independent Scholar

Born the son of Nathaniel Burr Graham and Marie Antoinette McCrosky in New York City in the early 1830’s, James Lorimer Graham led a privileged childhood and youth. Both his maternal uncle, Robert McCrosky, one of the founders of The Chemical Bank of New York, and his paternal uncle, James Graham, for whom he was named, played pivotal roles in his education and early career in publishing. His uncle James and aunt Julia Graham tutored him and his siblings in their Washington Square mansion. They were surrounded with original works of European art, a large library, the study of French and Italian at the home, and were included in the vibrant social life among the business, literary and political figures of the times. James’ rise as a savant was becoming apparent, and the family had him conclude his studies in France. His family connections opened many avenues for him, and he relished making the acquaintances of leading men in various fields.

When James returned to America after receiving his diploma, he worked for the shipping line of Howland and Aspinwall. The choice was inspired by two things: his older brother Robert’s serving in the US Navy and his love of travel. Indeed it was the news of the Gold Rush in California, promoted by the writings of Bayard Taylor, and the misadventures of two of the Graham cousins heading west that captivated the young James. Thus in December of 1853, Graham boarded the ill fated USS San Francisco, in order to sail to California. The American poet, Walt Whitman, was a fellow passenger, and composed a poem about the shipwreck and fate of the passengers. Graham survived the incident and the sobering effect was that he returned to New York, lived at his father’s house, married, and settled into a post working for Putnam’s Magazine.

During his early career, Graham took an active role in fostering the work of American artists and literary men. He became a member of The Century Club, an elite intellectual group, and one of its first librarians. As was a common practice of the era, Graham and his wife, Josephine A. Garner, planned a Grand Tour of Europe. The advent of the American Civil War gave them pause, but in 1862 they decided to set sail across the Atlantic. Traveling through England, Scotland, France, and Germany, the couple made their way to Italy and arranged a stay in Florence. For their thirteenth wedding anniversary, the Grahams purposely rented the apartment in the Casa Guidi that the Brownings had occupied, which they considered as a shrine for poetic inspiration. It was in London that the Grahams had met the aging Robert Browning, and they corresponded with him on several occasions. The Grahams made pilgrimages to every surrounding place associated with the Brownings, i.e. the Baths of Lucca, Bellosgardo, and Vallombrosa. In their library back in New York, the Grahams owned first editions of both Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Brownings’ works. When they visited the Porta à Pinti Cemetery to see her tomb, they entered a beautiful memorial garden that pleased them both.

The Grahams experienced an unexpected decline in their purchasing power due to the reduced exchange rate of the American dollar resulting from their country’s civil war. They returned to New York somewhat downcast, but they vowed to return to Europe and especially to Florence. Thus in 1866, when their financial condition had improved through Graham’s work with his father and uncles at The Metropolitan Insurance Company, he was honored at a valedictory banquet at Delmonico’s Restaurant in New York by his closest friends. He and Josephine had announced that they would return to Europe and live as Americans abroad. Drawn once again to Florence by their friend Bayard Taylor, who had been taken seriously ill at the Casa Guidi apartment of the Brownings which he rented for his family that spring, the Grahams rented the Villa of Marqhese Manelli which was beyond the Porta Pinti on the road to Fiesole near the Villa Palmieri. They were just a thirty minute carriage ride to see their friend, the American sculptor Hiram Powers and his family. The lease at the Villa Manelli was for six months, the Grahams intending to buy a property and arrange the transport of their library and art collection from Manhattan. Circumstances aided them in their plans.

In 1869, the US Consulship was unexpectedly left vacant by the departure then sudden death of Timothy Bigelow Lawrence in Washington, D.C. Many friends lobbied on Graham’s behalf with the Grant administration to make Graham the next US Consul. This appointment was a serious political position, for Florence would become briefly the capital of a united, secular Italy. Graham’s connections, education and experience served him well, however, and he served as a consul until his death in 1876. With this appointment secured, the Grahams settled into the city and became leading members of the American colony.

Graham operated an efficient office, and he wisely retained the services of the consulate’s secretary, the Florentine banker, Joseph Matteini. With his own moderate wealth and standing in the community, Graham’s tenure was marked by fairness and honesty. He courted the advice and favor of the retired doyen of the US diplomatic corps, George Perkins Marsh, then residing in Italy. Graham did not mix his personal interests with his public post and thus avoided the scandals that Franklin Torrey, the US Consul at Carrara, often found himself entangled in. Josephine became the consummate hostess, and as etiquette dictated, the couple received all public visitors weekly on Tuesday afternoons at an open house. The Grahams purchased the Villa Orsini on the Via Valfonda, a four acre estate next to the train station. Here Josephine organized charity events and started the tradition of selling Christmas trees and evergreen boughs to aid the needy members of the Anglo-American community. From 1869 to 1876, the Grahams were in residence and had established themselves well. It was the final year for the couple that tested Josephine’s strength of will.

Not only did she lose her husband that April, but in the summer, her brother and sister-in-law were drowned in a yachting accident off the waters of New York City. Her financial situation had to be clarified, as the estates she had received from her husband and father had to provide for minor nieces and nephews. The bankruptcy also that year of her beloved uncle by marriage, James Graham, added to her personal sorrows. She persevered, however, through the financial and legal settlements, and after the required mourning period of a year, Josephine accepted a proposal of marriage from her confidant and friend, Joseph Matteini, the US Consulate secretary. His faithful service and friendship to both the Grahams was something the couple always treasured. Thus, Josephine secured her legal and social position in Florence and would quietly pass away in 1892 at her small summer residence, the Villa Celli in Pistoia. Both she and Matteini were buried in the Allori Cemetery, that at Porta à Pinti having been closed in 1877.

Josephine decided to purchase a plot on the main aisle of the Porta à Pinti Cemetery near the tomb of Elizabeth Barrett Browning for her husband’s grand tomb. The couple had witnessed the interment of many American expatriates in this Protestant burial ground known familiarly as ‘The English Cemetery.’ Even though the Grahams had the financial means and political connections to arrange for their burials in the fashionable Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York where their families were buried, they both would chose Florence for their final resting place. As US Consul, Graham had arranged several burials in the city and he was in attendance when his good friend Hiram Powers was laid to rest in 1873. Josephine hired their good friend, the American sculptor Launt Thompson, to sculpt James’ sarcophagus. It was to feature a profile medallion portrait in bas-relief and the Graham family coat of arms. Thompson was working on the tomb even when the cemetery was officially closed. The poet, Algernon C. Swinburne, devastated by his close friend’s death, wrote a five stanza poem, entitled Epicede, which appeared in the Boston Athenaeum. The last memorial tribute came years later at the dedication of the Graham’s library to The Century Club in New York when the American writer, Edmund C. Stedman, composed a poem entitled Ad Grahamum Abeuntem. Graham was laid to rest in his beloved Florence and his friends extolled his virtues. He and Josephine had decided to raise a tomb monument in their adopted country.

Graham’s legacy might have faded into the background as his unabashed Romanticism was not one of the popular trends of the late 19th Century. Even though he had become a modern Maecenas and had fostered the career of many artists and literary figures, contemporaries who often became life long friends, his efforts were usually done quietly. Graham’s own large collection of books, letters, paintings and sculptures, housed in its final years at the Villa Orsini, were a testament to his interests and tastes. Josephine kept the collections intact and passed them and her properties on to her cousins. By 1945, however, the Villa Orsini was put up for sale by the family who needed the money more than the property. The new Swiss owner, having bought the Villa and its contents, discovered several boxes in the furnace room. They were filled with valuable historical letters and memorabilia collected by James and Josephine. Many of the Graham’s personal papers and letters were there. An American scholar, Clara Louise Dentler, a writer and retired history teacher who had come to Florence that year to live and to continue her research and writing, was hired to catalogue the contents prior to their auction. The Graham’s library had previously been bequeathed upon Josephine’s death to The Century Club in New York where it had been catalogued by the historian, Dr. Paul Leicester Ford, and dedicated in the late 1890’s. The couple’s art collection had been sold piecemeal over the years, mostly by their elderly female cousins, who had inherited the Villa Orsini but not the means to support themselves in the style that the Grahams had maintained. Thus Graham’s letters, coins, medals, etchings and historical memorabilia were auctioned in the late 1950’s in London and New York. Only Dentler’s catalogue speaks to the scope of this copious collector.

There were two important pieces in the Graham collection that revealed something about the couple. One item was a book of pressed flowers and leaves from places visited by the Grahams on their European Grand Tour of 1862-63. The couple had made a point to visit the grave or home of the poet or artist of virtually every literary and poetical association that the Grahams had represented in their library. Their itinerary reads like an intellectual treasure hunt. True to the Victorian times, they clipped a leaf or a flower from the graves or homes of these illustrious figures in order to commemorate their visit and to preserve the memento in this special album.

The other item was Ye Booke of Ye Goode Fellowes which Graham had begun before his marriage to Josephine and which she would finish after his death. It contained the signatures and personal wishes to James or Josephine of many leading figures of the mid 19th Century. Perhaps a type of forerunner of today’s autograph book, the Grahams had the foresight to ask men of importance to collectively register their names and remarks for posterity. The booked was secured in the archival vault of The Century Club. The Grahams understood that the contributions of talented men would endure, because they believed in the saying, Ars longa, vita brevis est, and it was their hope that their little book would serve as a witness to their small contribution in meeting and often supporting such active minds and creative men.

Bibliography
Begeal, Jeffrey. James Lorimer Graham, Jr. c. 1832-1876. Biography of an American Savant. Villa de Bella Silva Press: Smithfield, NC. 2004.
Carpenter, Helen Graham. Reverend John Graham of Woodbury, Connecticut. Chicago, Monastery Hill, 1942.
Dentler, Clara Louise. Famous Foreigners in Florence, 1400-1900. Bemporad Marzocco: Florence, Italy, 1964.
_____. A Privately Owned Collection of Letters, Autographs and Manuscripts with Many Association Items. The Getty Research Institute: Los Angeles, CA.
Furst, Dr. Clyde. The James Lorimer Graham Library. Address delivered before The Century Association, 1 May 1926.
Kavalecs, Andrew. James Lorimer Graham, Jr. Fosterer of American-German Literary Relations. Dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University, March 1972.
Taylor, Bayard. Bayard Taylor Papers, 1825-1878 at The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Varnum, James M. James Lorimer Graham, Jr. Address delivered before The Century Association, 17 January 1894.
Wunder, Richard Paul. Select correspondence between Richard Paul Wunder and Clara Louise Dentler, 1965-1977. Richard P. Wunder Papers: Wheaton College, Illinois.

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Tracking Enigma--A Grave with a Nickname in the English Cemetery, Florence
Margot Fortunato Galt, University of Minnesota, and Hamline University, St. Paul, Minnesota

What is it that draws us to attention and starts us on the long trail of research and discovery? In 2000 I stepped through the creaking
gates of Florence’s English Cemetery (always and continuously owned and financed by the Swiss). As I trudged up the steep path, I saw to my left a name on a simple, elegant tombstone: "Libby." I’d been reading full names--Walter Savage Landor, Arthur Hugh Clough, Mary Spencer Stanhope. This nickname from a death in 1861 struck me as odd, intentionally flouting public formalities. What kind of woman could have provoked such intimacy? Was she a courtesan such as the dancers and singers I’d recently seen in Degas’ paintings? Or was this woman so deeply loved by her grief-stricken family that they could only part with her up-close--her full name too formal and distant? The tombstone also included standard information: "Elizabeth Russell Jarves, wife of James Jackson Jarves of Boston, Massachusetts, died in Florence 1861." This data proved crucial in uncovering Libby’s bare bones, but it did not propel me forward as much as her nickname on her grave. What had occasioned it? Among the non-Catholic stranieri of Florence, that nickname set her even more apart. If I were to write about her, as I sensed I might, I wanted my discoveries to live up to this first sudden enigma.

Fairly early, I learned two major characteristics about her: unlike Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Fanny Trollope, her exact
contemporaries and acquaintances in Florence, she had no fame in letters (the only art form proper for middle-class, genteel women of the time). "Libby" was neither attached to a well-known male nor widely regarded, like Isa Blagden, confidante to both Brownings and the recipient of many letters and frequent mentions in diaries and memoirs. Libby’s husband James Jackson Jarves did acquire a middling reputation among the vital and eccentric English-speaking community. He wrote travel books--one on Italy was published five years after they arrived. And he also produced dull treatises on art, sparked by his artistic conversion early in their European decade. He also followed spiritualism with Elizabeth Barrett Browning and incurred Robert’s disdain. Most importantly he collected early Renaissance Italian art, a practice which set him apart from the ex-patriot community. "Tell Jarves," became a mild joke when someone noticed a dealer or a painting waiting to be snatched up. Had Jarves’ collection remained in Italy and been dispersed after his death, it would likely have had little effect on the history of art. But through extraordinary dedication and years traveling between Florence and the U.S., Jarves managed to rouse interest in his Italian primitives and, a few years before Libby died, he sold the collection to Yale University.

It was the first collection of early Renaissance Italian art in the United States, and when tastes shifted in the 20th-century, the Jarves collection came into its own. Yale commissioned a biography written by Francis Steegmuller to celebrate the collection’s centenary. In this biography I found the bare bones of Libby’s life. Steegmuller hinted at the cracks in her marriage--her husband spend money for art, not shoes, and he left home for months at a time, not unlike the whaling captains of her New Bedford hometown. Steegmuller acknowledged that Libby might have had cause to gripe at Jim’s expenditures, and the footnotes hinted at a clandestine affair in Florence. Finally I felt the warmth of her life rise to the surface.

But history singes all kinds of people. Would anyone care about a minor figure who left a tantalizing nickname on a tombstone? Though Libby died agonizingly at 40, probably from tuberculosis; though her three children had, like her, "bestemmiato" [curse] the art which made them poor, her plucky independent voice rose with warmth and power from the folded letters in the Yale archives. Slowly my questions about her changed. Not who was Libby, but what was she? What did it take for a young women, married at eighteen, to set sail immediately for Hawaii where James made poor investments and started his career in journalism? He eventually wrote the first history of Hawaii in English, an invaluable portrait of native life, much less cramped by Christian strictures than the notes of his compatriots. Though befriended by the American missionary community, Libby was not much involved in doing good, but she was known for keeping a sparkling house and riding on horseback into the hills. How did she view the native people, dying in large numbers from imported diseases?

Did her experience among them shape her later attitudes toward the Italians, frequently disdained by the English-speaking community?
After a decade of marriage in Hawaii, what summoned her to continue the marriage to James when she clearly wanted to break away?
Once in Florence, often alone with two, then three children, she lived in a kind of limbo, poorer than her maids yet educated to consider her life differently. As she wrote in Italian to eldest Horatio or in English to her sister and parents, her voice was direct, a bit mocking, intimate with complexities, nothing like the self-important, rationalizing voice of her husband. I wanted to give the essence of her personality and life to world, along with her cranky, art-obsessed, gullible mate. The major question that remained was how best to do this? Should I write a standard biography or a modern version of the historical novel? What would give Libby the vivid expansive shape she deserved?

Bibliography
Baker, Paul R. The Fortunate Pilgrims: Americans in Italy,1800-1860. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964.
Baxandall, Michael: Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972, 1988,
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Aurora Leigh and other poems, edited by J. R. G. Bolton and Julia Bolton Holloway. London: Penguin Books, 1995.
________________________, The Letters, Vol I and Vol II, edited by Frederic Kenyon. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1897.
Dearest Isa: Robert Browning’s Letters to Isabella Blagden, edited by Edward C. McAleer. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1951.
Jarves, James Jackson. History of the Hawaiian or Sandwich Islands. Boston: Tappan & Dennet, 1843.
___________________. Italian Sights and Papal Principles.... New York: Harper & Brothers, 1856.
Nathaniel Hawthorne. The French and Italian Notebooks, edited by Thomas Woodson. Ohio State University Press, 1980.
Lewis, R. W. B. The City of Florence. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1995.
LiPira, Benedict. Giuseppe Garibaldo: A Biography of The Father of Modern Italy. Baltimore: Noble House, 1983.
Missionary Album: Portraits and Biographical Sketches of the American Protestant Missionaries to the Hawaiian Islands. Honolulu:
Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society, 1969.
Smith, Denis Mack. The Making of Modern Italy, 1796-1879. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.
Steegmuller, Francis. The Two Lives of James Jackson Jarves. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951.
Trollope, Thomas Adolphus. What I Remember, edited by Herbert van Thal. London: William Kimber, originally published 1887. Condensed edition, 1973.
Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Artists, Vol I and Vol II. Selection translated by George Bull. London: Penguin Books, 1965.

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Louisa Catherine Adams Kuhn, Florentine Adventures, 1859-1860

Robert J. Robertson, Lamar University, Beaumont, Texas

Louisa Catherine Adams Kuhn (1831-1870) was the daughter of Charles Francis Adams and Abigail Brooks Adams, sister of famed historian Henry Adams, and wife of Charles F. Kuhn, a businessman from Philadelphia. During 1859-1860, Louisa and her husband lived six months in Florence, Italy, where they became avid members of the Anglo-Florentine community, and where she wrote twenty-six home letters describing their adventures in the ancient Tuscan capital. She told of their travel to Florence, their grand apartment with servants and carriages, her relations with husband and family members (especially her brother Henry), parties and dinners with American, English, Russian, and Italian friends, attendance at operas, revels during Carnival, and celebrations of the Risorgimento, the political unification of Italy.

Louisa, a high-spirited and articulate young woman, wrote interesting and amusing letters, dashing off long paragraphs, filling them with colorful details, and spicing them with humor and irony. Her accounts of people, places, and events add new material to the literature pertaining to the Anglo-Florentines, especially with respect to her social relations with prominent Italian citizens, her admiration for the Italian people, her enthusiasm for the language and music of Italy, and most importantly, her endorsement of Italian nationalism. She composed brilliant eyewitness accounts of events of the political unification of Tuscany with the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, then ruled by King Victor Emanuel.

During the American Civil War, Louisa and her husband lived in the United States, but after the war they returned to Europe and during 1869-1870 lived again in Florence. During 1870, when they summered at Bagni di Lucca, she had carriage accident, contracted tetanus, and suffered an agonizing death, an event witnessed and brilliantly described by Henry in his The Education of Henry Adams. At her instructions, she was buried in the “English” cemetery in Florence.

Primary sources include Louisa’s twenty-six home letters, The Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA.; the New York Times; and guidebooks Murray, A Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy (1861), and Baedeker, Italy: Handbook for Travellers (1869). Secondary sources include Nagel, Descent from Glory: Four Generations of the John Adams Family (1983); Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1931); Holmes (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of Italy (1997); Treves, The Golden Ring, The Anglo-Florentines, 1847-1862 (1956); Baker, The Fortunate Pilgrims, Americans in Italy, 1800-1860The Anglo-Americans in Florence (1997); and Wanrooij (ed.), Otherness: Anglo-American Women in 19th and 20rh Century Florence (1964); Fantoni (ed.), (2001).

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Virtual Papers:

I. Villino Trollope, Piazza Independenza: Incubator for the Independence for the African-American
Brenda Ayres, Liberty University

Ever since President Lincoln reportedly said to Harriet Beecher Stowe, “So you're the little woman that started this great war!”, Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been considered the juggernaut to end slavery in America. Indeed, it did create quite the uproar, but the novel did not emerge in a literary vacuum. As of a few years ago, most history books and Web sites gave credit to Richard Hildreth for having written the first anti-slavery novel with his 1836 The Slave: or Memoirs of Archy Moore; However, this book was not published until six months after Frances Trollope’s The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw. More recently and appropriately, Trollope has been recognized as the trail blazer. Nevertheless, Hildreth was important to the Abolition Movement, as was his friendship and work with Theodore Parker to defeat the Fugitive Slave Law and slavery altogether.

Fanny Trollope did not write in a vacuum either. She came to America in 1827, and not to just any place in America, but to Cincinnati, Ohio, situated across from Kentucky with only the Ohio River separating free from slave states. There she learned firsthand from runaways the horrors of slavery, was compelled by financial necessity to turn to writing, and produced a book that challenged America’s claim to be the land of the free. Even though Domestic Manners made her famous and rich overnight, she was not finished. Her heart was so moved by the plight of slaves, she wrote Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, a powerful book that although not received well in America, did contribute to the end of slavery throughout the British colonies; inspired the formation of the 1839 British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, for the purpose of inserting pressure on America to make slavery illegal; and became the model for Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Her influence did not end with her writing. While in Cincinnati, she befriended Hiram Powers and combined forces. The result was his sculpture of “The Greek Slave,” that toured throughout America, was exhibited in the Crystal Palace in London, and became the icon for the Abolition Movement.

His statue inspired Elizabeth Barrett Browning to write “Hiram Power's ‘Greek Slave.’” Even before he and Trollope relocated to Florence where Barrett Browning also resided, the famous poet had published numerous anti-slavery verses. The statue, as a symbol of oppression, became the focus for other writers as well, whose works were then widely disseminated through abolition periodicals.

In Florence Hildreth, Parker, Powers, Trollope, and Barrett Browning forged a friendship with each other that energized and directed their exertions to abolish slavery. Stowe visited them in Florence as well. In fact, her path crossed Trollope’s earlier in Cincinnati, which is apparent in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

All of these abolitionists—and several more besides—fought the war for independence from what might be considered their headquarters, Villano Trollope, in the Piazza Independenza. Except for Stowe, they are now at rest in the English Cemetery where homage is paid for their valiant fight for freedom.

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I. Theodore Parker’s Graves
Sally Mitchell, Temple University

Theodore Parker, who had been, according to the Springfield Daily Republican, “for ten years the greatest preacher in America, and had gathered in Boston what was then its largest congregation,” was buried in Florence’s “English” Cemetery on 13 May 1860, three days after his death from tuberculosis. Almost at once the modest grave with Joel Tanner Hart’s simple headstone became a place of pilgrimage for American tourists. By the 1880s, however, some were complaining about the dark cypresses, the overgrown shrubbery, and the “rude tombstone.” A plan to restore the site and commission a “worthy monument” aroused public debate (if only a subdued echo of the controversies in Parker’s lifetime) but ultimately a new monument of white marble by William Wetmore Story was dedicated on Thanksgiving Day in 1891.

Born in 1810 on his family’s farm in Lexington, Theodore Parker was a rebel by inheritance: his will, quoted in the New York Times on 4 July 1860, presented to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts two firearms belonging to his grandfather, John Parker, who had been captain of the militia at Lexington green on the 19th of April, 1775. One was “the large musket or king’s arm, which was by him captured from the British . . . and which is the first firearm taken from the enemy in the war of Independence”; the other “was used by him in that battle while fighting in ‘the sacred cause of God and his country.’” As a young man, Parker supported himself by teaching in local schools while mastering the Harvard curriculum on his own. He then enrolled in Harvard Divinity School, graduating in 1836. He was also attending meetings of the Transcendental Club and reading in the new German higher criticism. Under the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1838 Divinity School Address, Parker began, while serving as pastor to a Unitarian congregation in West Roxbury, to make a wide-ranging study of critical exegesis, historical theology, and non-Christian religious traditions. In the words of a reminiscence published in the New York Times on 2 June 1860:

By gradual steps, he discarded what he considered the fundamental errors of the orthodox faith, building up for himself a belief founded on certain incontrovertible principles of truth and banishing sectarian dogmas as unworthy of the civilization of the age. As summed up by himself, he preached these three doctrines – first, the infinite perfection of God; second, the adequacy of Man for all his functions; third, absolute or natural religion. “For these three great doctrines – of God, of Man, of Religion – (he writes) – I have depended on no Church and no Scripture; yet have I found things to serve me in every Church. I have sought my authority in the Nature of Man . . .”

Parker’s A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion, published in 1842, helped readers in many countries who were then conducting their own agonized battles with the strictures of organized Christianity. One of them wrote many years later that Parker “infused into the religious life of England and America an element hardly present before, of natural confidence in the absolute goodness of God independent of theologies. No man did more than he to awaken the Protestant nations from the hideous nightmare of an Eternal Hell, which (within my own recollection) hovered over the piety of England. As he was wont himself to say, laughingly, he had ‘knocked the bottom out of hell!’” (Cobbe, Life, 2:10).

By the mid-1840s his theology was too radical for most Unitarian clergy and he began to preach independently in Boston. Within a few years his sermons could fill the massive Boston Music Hall, built in 1852 to house what was then the world’s largest organ. “In all his preaching,” according to the 2 June reminiscence, “social problems bore a prominent relation to his discourse. He inveighed against intemperance, against covetousness; labored for education and for the elevation of woman; preached against war, and denounced Slavery as a concrete wrong; . . . bore testimony against men high in office, and did not hesitate to apply the sharpest caustic to sins national or sins personal.” People were drawn to his sermons, said the New York Times obituary of 29 May 1860, by its “eloquence, power, and novelty”:

he agitated every popular and unpopular subject, with a vigor and fearlessness that carried his auditors along with him . . . and almost forced them to agree with his conclusions, even against their will. But, most of all, he dwelt on the Slavery question . . . promulgating the extreme views in relation to it . . . He lectured in nearly all the cities of the Free States, drawing immense crowds wherever he appeared, and scarcely provoking opposition from his most earnest dissentients, who were for the time silenced and carried away by the rolling torrent of his speech.

Parker’s abolitionist zeal made enemies and brought personal risks. He openly called for citizens to disobey the 1850 fugitive slave act, helped establish the Boston Vigilance Committee, concealed fugitives in his house, put them on ships bound for England. After speaking to a large crowd at Faneuil Hall on May 26th 1854 he was indicted and arrested (although ultimately not tried) on the grounds that he “did knowingly and wilfully obstruct, resist, and oppose” a U.S. marshall “in the due and lawful execution” of his duty to apprehend one Anthony Burns for return to his owner in Virginia. He was, in addition, one of the silent backers who supplied John Brown with weapons and money for the raid on Harper’s Ferry.

Although no longer considered the greatest intellect among New England Transcendentalists, Theodore Parker may be the only one noted for personal charisma. Louisa May Alcott at age 24 was living in an attic room in a Boston boardinghouse and looking for work (sewing, childminding, any work at all). In November 1856 she wrote in her journal “Go to hear Parker, and he does me good . . . He is like a great fire where all can come and be warmed and comforted.” (She later used him as model for the radical clergyman Thomas Power in her 1873 novel Work.) Alcott was thrilled by Of the Public Function of Woman, which asserted that a woman “has the same natural rights as man . . . – to vote, to hold office, to make and administer laws” and by his conception of the divine. “Parker’s prayers were one of the strongest attraction of his church,” she wrote in her preface to Prayers by Theodore Parker (1882), “the phrase, ‘Our Father and our Mother God,’ was inexpressibly sweet and beautiful .”

A decade earlier his writing had sustained another young woman across the Atlantic. Frances Power Cobbe in 1846 (also 24 years old, in despair over her loss of faith and afraid to reveal it to anyone she knew) saw an advertisement for Parker's Discourse of Religion, ordered a copy from her bookseller, and found it virtually lifesaving. Two years later, deeply lonely after her mother’s death and the trauma of telling her father that she was no longer a Christian, she gathered her courage and wrote a letter to Boston. Parker’s generous response, dated May 5, 1848, began "I rejoice exceedingly at being able to smooth the difficulties away which have been thrown in the way of religion . . . Your history lends additional interest to it all. I know how you must have suffered under that bewildering orthodox theology . . .” and opened a correspondence that lasted until his death. In 1855 she was able to send him her own first book, published anonymously as An Essay on Intuitive Morals. Part I, Theory of Morals (her father was still alive). Thanking her for it, Parker wrote that it was a "noble book" and added that "your learning also surprizes me." Over the next two years he promoted publication of Cobbe’s work in the United States and secured reviews in reputable American journals. His letter of August 1857, however, reported that he had been ill for nearly six months. In 1859 he said farewell to his congregation and set out for warmer climates. By the end of the year he had settled for the winter in Rome.

Frances Power Cobbe was also in Italy by late December 1859, sharing an apartment in Villa Brichieri on Bellosguardo with her friend (and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s) Isa Blagden. As spring drew on, invalids who had wintered in Rome made their way towards the healthier air of Florence. On April 28th, Cobbe saw Theodore Parker for the first time, "lying in bed his back to the light . . . He took my hand tenderly . . . I kissed his hand and I daresay he felt a tear on it." The notebooks she kept at the time record daily visits, although she was not always admitted to the room. A letter written on April 29th to someone who passed it on to John Weiss, Parker’s first biographer, expands on the phrases jotted in her notebook:

He lies quite quietly on his bed, with his back to the light . . . I do not think he sees anything, except vaguely. They say he must have made a great effort to be as collected as he was with me yesterday; to-day it was nearly all wandering, about what he would do in America, how he would lie still in his house, and be very comfortable and happy.
He received me yesterday when I went to his bedside very tenderly, saying “After all our wishes to meet, how strange it should be thus at last! You are not to think or say you have seen me – this is only the memory of me. Those who love me most can only wish me a speedy passage to the other world. Of course I am not afraid to die” (he said this with what I could have supposed his old fire), “but there was so much to do.” (Weiss, 2:438)

By early May he was generally dozing, and on May 10th Dr. Appleton told her the end was very near. The next day Cobbe wrote a letter to her friend Francis Newman (younger brother of Cardinal Newman, but himself well known as a non-denominational theist), who supplied it to London newspapers; it was reprinted on the front page of the New York Times for 31 May 1860:

I have sad news to communicate. Our dear suffering friend, Theodore Parker, died yesterday evening. Yet there never was an easier end to a life but lately full of vigor. I saw him about three hours before he died, lying calmly, while life was ebbing away unconsciously to himself. He left written directions for his funeral, limiting to five persons the attending him to the grave, of whom I am one. Many Americans here are expressing their wish to appear as mourners; but it is thought right to abide by his instructions. He desired the eleven first verses of the Sermon on the Mount (the blessings of Jesus) to be read over his grave; and then a plain grey stone, with his name and age and nothing farther of inscription. Mr. Cunningham, a Boston Unitarian minister, will read the passage. He is a sincere friend and admirer of Parker’s.

As she recorded in the autobiography written more than thirty years later:

The funeral took place on Sunday, the 13th May, at the beautiful old Campo Santo Inglese . . . It was the first funeral I had ever attended. The coffin when I arrived, was already lying in the mortuary chapel. My companions placed a wreath of laurels on it, and I added a large bunch of the lily-of-the-valley which he had loved. . . . The burial ground is exquisitely lovely, a very wilderness of flowers and perfume. Only a few cypresses give it grandeur, not gloom. All Florence was decorated with flags in honor of the anniversary of the Piedmontese Constitution. We said to one another: “It is a festival for us also – the solemn feast of an Ascension.” (2:12)

Joel Tanner Hart was commissioned to select the plain grey stone and carve the simple inscription Parker had requested:

T H E O D O R E P A R K E R,
Born at Lexington, Mass.
U n i t e d S t a t e s of A m e r i c a,
Aug. 24, 1810
Died at Florence May 10,
1860

By summer’s end American travelers were already visiting Parker’s grave and clipping a few blades of grass or a flower for remembrance. “The Tomb of Theodore Parker,” from the 5 September New York Times, is datelined Florence, Friday Aug. 17, 1860:

The Swiss Protestant Cemetery, under the shade of Cypress trees and the grey old walls of Florence, is interesting to Americans as well as to pilgrims from other countries where the religion of Luther and other Reformers prevails. . . . The body of Theodore Parker lies in that hallowed inclosure. . . . I remember to have heard a foreigner – who knows our country well – say, when Theodore Parker died, “It seems to me, that in his death, America has lost her most brilliant intellect.”

The column concludes by wondering why Parker’s body had not been returned to Boston and suggesting that he might not have wanted to rest in ground tainted by slavery: “Here he will rest peacefully and well until, perhaps, when the great warfare of which he was one of the grandest champions, is ended, the city which he loved so will claim his dust, and give it no unworthy burial.” A letter from the Reverend Gilbert Haven published in the New Hampshire Sentinel on 18 December 1862 (two weeks before the Emancipation Proclamation took effect) has a similar conclusion:

Pass up the path to the central cross, and turn to the right. Go a few feet toward the wall. The path is lined with young cypresses. Close to it, on the left or north side, under the cypresses, in a cool and perpetual shadow, is a large, thick, gray sandstone slab, with [a] simple inscription . . . The thick grass about it was wet with dew at that after midday hour. The grave was overrun with ivy and myrtle. Two yew bushes were flourishing near the head stone, and a small evergreen shrub was growing near his feet. The tall cypresses covered it with their dense shade. From under their boughs you could look out eastward and see the hills of Fiesole across the valley, with their bright villas – the tall grey tower of its ancient cathedral, and the lofty seat where Lorenzo De Medici and his friends held high converse on Plato. The spot was very inviting, from the coolness, shade, and silence. . . . Why Mr. Parker was left here is to me a mystery. Pleasant and retired as is the spot, soft and grand as is the scenery, the graveyard at Lexington is preferable. Perhaps, his friends may say, it was that, dreading the downfall of America before the dragon of slavery, he gave commandment concerning his bones, that they should not rest in such recreant soil. Thus the agitation which his life produced revives over his grave.

Visitors continued to seek out the spot in the decades after the Civil War. Dr. Holland, whose letter was published in the Springfield Weekly Republican on 24 July 1870, saw “a little group of Americans around the grave of Theodore Parker . . . when they left . . . we found the offering of affection which they had deposited there – a magnificent bouquet of flowers. There was something very touching in this tribute to one greatly loved at home, who had laid down his burden in a foreign land. It made me think better of the dead who could command such homage, and the living who were moved to leave the path of pleasure to render it.” Louisa May Alcott came in 1871:

Standing by his grave in Florence, it seemed at first a lonely and forlorn spot for such honored dust to lie in; but as we looked we found that many pilgrims had worn a path to this shrine, that other hands had brought fresh offerings, and, in the myrtle that spread its green coverlet over the low bed, a little bird had built its nest, as if sure of a refuge there, although the hospitable heart lay still below. Finding comfort in these signs and symbols, we dropped our flowers, poor gifts for the greatest help one human soul can give another, and went away, feeling that in neither Florence nor Rome should we find any thing more beautiful or grand than the life of one who loved his neighbor better than himself, and prayed for all men as his brothers. (Preface, vii)

A correspondent describing a European tour for the San Francisco Evening Bulletin reported in the installment published on 30 January 1873:

One day we visited the grave of Theodore Parker, which is the “mecca” of many pilgrims. It is a really delightful spot, this cemetery. It used to be away on the outskirts, but now the growing city has taken it in, leveled the grounds around it, bounded it by splendid boulevards, and left a beautiful knoll thickly studded with monumental and memorial marbles, and overhung by cypress trees and a few pines. . . . The plain stone at the head of Parker’s grave is of some kind of dark granite, and as some one has said, “that and the little stone pine over it are fit emblems of the strong and sturdy characteristics of the man.”

Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in September 1873 published a 6-page article by O.M. Spencer, “The Protestant Cemetery at Florence,” which includes a drawing of Theodore Parker’s gravestone and a long tribute but nevertheless reflects Spencer’s religious hesitation: “Whatever views we may entertain of Theodore as the champion of that liberal Christianity . . . it is difficult to stand over his grave and read the simple inscription upon his tombstone without adding a passing tribute to his memory as a man and a philanthropist. . . . few, if any, entertain a doubt as to the value of his services in the temperance, antislavery, and other humanitarian causes. He proclaimed a revolution when it required the courage of a martyr to do it.”

Hesitation was also arising, as the years passed, about the “forlorn spot” (in Alcott’s words) and the “tangled flower bed” (in Spencer’s). When Frances Power Cobbe, who had in the interim edited the 14-volume Collected Works of Theodore Parker, returned to Florence in the winter of 1878-79, she found that the “cypresses had grown large and dark and somewhat shadowed it.” (Life 2:12). A “Letter from Italy” in the Worcester Daily Spy on 4 February 1879 described “only a flat stone half hidden beneath the lower branches of a fir tree.” When Parker’s wife died in April 1881, the Springfield Daily Republican reported that mourners at her funeral “thought of that Italian grave as often as of this American one “ and that although a “wreath of Italian myrtle from Parker’s grave in Florence lay on the coffin of his wife” they hoped that someday “his bones will be brought over to lie beside those of his well-beloved wife at Mount Auburn.”

In 1883, Theodore Stanton (Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s son, a journalist living in Paris) visited Florence and found that the graves of English and American writers “were generally marked by memorials worthy of the literature their occupants enriched and of the land in which they died” but that Theodore Parker’s “rude tombstone . . . did scant credit either to American Taste or national gratitude.” Resolving “to do what I could to change this state of things,” (“Theodore Parker’s Grave”) he wrote to a number of people he believed would be interested, including Frances Power Cobbe. She replied on January 3rd [1886]:

Dear Mr Stanton
Thank you for yr kind letter . . . Thank you also very much for telling me of your intended restoration of Theodore Parker’s tomb. I should have been sorry not to have shared in the work. I visited the spot again . . . about five years ago & then paid the custode to renew the violets & otherwise set it in order – But the cypresses – (ugly ones they are) – had grown so as to shadow it sadly –, & it is, as you say, far too humble & neglected. I hope the fund raised will suffice to erect a worthy monument – Something I think of a canopy or a bust – or a white marble headstone with a medallion & his head in intaglio-rilevato, would perhaps be best. Some one really qualified ought to be asked to compose a suitable epitaph – or to select a passage from his own writings to serve as such.

She at once sent a contribution and followed two weeks later with the names and addresses of friends in England who she believed “would certainly be pleased to be invited” to contribute to the “Parker Fund.”

Stanton’s Paris occupation in 1886-1889 as publisher of The European Correspondent, a syndicated service providing information (and gossip) to be used by American newspaper editors, gave him a vehicle to make sure that news about the fund, it subscribers, and its plans were printed in a wide variety of papers. The Christian Recorder, for example, on 11 August 1887, mentioned that Elizabeth Cady Stanton was in Paris sitting for the sculptor Paul Bartlett of Boston, and added, “Mr. Bartlett will probably execute the medallion of Theodore Parker which will be placed on the reformer’s grave in Florence.” (If there ever was such a plan, nothing came of it.)

But just as Theodore Parker alive had been the focus of strong feelings, Theodore Stanton’s plan to replace the headstone aroused its own controversy. “The Grave of Theodore Parker,” printed in the Worcester Daily Spy on 28 July 1886 included one heated response:

It having been stated that Theodore Parker’s grave in Florence is neglected, the Rev. W.J. Potter sends . . . a note from Miss Hannah E. Stevenson regarding the choice of his burial place and the simple marking of it, which has been criticised as rude. Miss Stevenson, Mr. Potter recalls, was a member of Mr. Parker’s family, went abroad with him and his wife on that last fruitless journey in search of health, and saw him buried, and none of his surviving friends has more right to speak for his intimate wish than she. Miss Stevenson writes: “Mr Parker was averse to monumental display in burial places. He so expressed himself at home, and at Santa Cruz, and afterward in Rome. ‘Let the tree lie where it falls,’ was his injunction, and his congregation so respected his wish that they refrained from transporting the remains to America, which they earnestly desired to do. ‘When I die, let a plain headstone, with name and place and dates, mark my place of burial.’ This was said repeatedly. In reverent regard for his wishes, a place was selected in the Protestant cemetery of Florence; the services of Mr. Hart, the American sculptor, were accepted to select the proper stone for the purpose, slate not belonging there, and the desired inscription was made, fair and legible and durable. The turf with violets filled the surrounding curb, and a stone pine was planted outside. A Swiss gentleman, who had the supervising care of the cemetery, informed us that by the payment then of $100 the grave would be kept in perpetual repair, and he received the required sum. Afterward he sent some photographs of the spot which represented it exactly as it had been designed to be. From time to time pressed flowers and slips of the ivy planted there by Samuel Johnson and Samuel Longfellow have been sent to Mrs. Parker and me, by friends who said nothing of the appearance of ‘neglect.’ Even to this year the gifts are received.”

Challenged by further objections and questions from Mr. Potter, who argued that “the design of the grave should be preserved,” (although he left a small opening by suggesting that “perhaps a more durable stone may be needed”) Stanton wrote soothingly in The Open Court for 12 May 1887 that “my own wishes would be satisfied if a good bronze bust or medallion of Parker were placed on his tomb . . . a common practice in European cemeteries [which] would be a source of pleasure to those who visit the grave.” When the subscriptions had been collected, “plans might be suggested as to how the fund should be employed so as to meet with the approbation of the majority of the subscribers.” He then continued:

Now a word about interfering with the original design of the grave. Although I fail to discover in this original design any artistic or architectural claims for its preservation, still if the near friends of Mr. Parker cling to it on sentimental grounds, I see no reason for unnecessarily wounding their feelings by changing it. But if we should finally decide to place a bust or medallion over his grave, and if we should then find that the present design must be modified in order to conform to the artistic requirements of the new situation, I suppose that the friends of Mr. Parker will then yield gracefully, provided nothing is done to destroy the simplicity that Theodore Parker himself desired should characterize his last resting place.

After that somewhat slippery response to an uncompromising statement by the last remaining person who had lived in Theodore Parker’s household (Parker and his wife had no children) Stanton evidently wanted equally telling support for his own plan and sent to the New York Tribune a letter from Frederick Douglass. (The letter was subsequently reprinted in Stanton’s “Frederick Douglass in Europe”):

Florence, May 10th, 1887
We arrived here after an all-night ride from Rome, this morning, and our first move outward after coffee was to visit the grave of Theodore Parker. We found it in the old Protestant cemetery, in the shade of a friendly cedar, and adorned, as it should be, with violets, iris and roses. The stone which commemorates him is, as you know, of dark brown and of the plainest workmanship. I am not an advocate of costly monuments over the decaying bodies of the dead, but if such may be properly employed to preserve the memory of great men and to show the appreciation of them who knew their worth, no monument could hardly be too costly to place over the dust of Theodore Parker. No man, according to his space in the world, did more than he to enlighten the minds of men, to quicken conscience, to exalt the idea of the character of God, to break the chains of mental and physical slavery. The stone at such a man’s grave should be a sermon, and should speak not only the language of the illustrious departed, but of them who knew him and loved him. Of these, no one has a better reason to wish his name honored than I and those I represent. His was the hammer and the fire that did their part in sundering the chains of slavery and covering long enslaved millions with the mantle of liberty. He was great in heart, great in mind and great in all the attributes which elevate and ennoble mankind. Let us see to it that at least in our day and generation no shadow shall fall upon his grave less friendly than that of the stately cedar which now stands like a faithful sentinel to guard his dust. I was glad to observe that the sexton, tho he spoke no English, readily knew to what grave I wished to be shown. His promptness told us that he had often led the way to that sacred spot.

Theodore Stanton’s article in The Open Court for May 12th was followed by more than a hundred names of people who had already contributed to the Parker Tomb Fund. Frederick Douglass was among them; so were a dozen religious radicals or members of women’s suffrage committees from England who were friends of Frances Power Cobbe, as well as Albert Reville and Ernest Renan of Paris, and Americans including Matilda Goddard of Boston (whose $25 subscription was a very large sum in the mid-1880s), Edna Dow Cheney (biographer of Louisa May Alcott), Abigail Williams May (a trustee of Tuskegee University and the first woman elected to the Boston School Committee), and Theodore Tilton (the man who brought John Brown’s body to New York after his execution).

The public controversy – at least so far as it can be traced in available newspapers – seems to have lost its energy soon thereafter. (Hannah Stevenson, herself a sturdy activist who had nursed in Washington D.C. hospitals during the Civil War and subsequently established schools under the Freedmen’s Bureau, evidently died in either 1887 or 1889.) The Worcester Daily Spy for 3 February 1889 reported that the “pastor of one of the prominent churches of this city . . . seemed to think that Mr. Parker was forgotten, and that his remains are resting in his lonely grave in Florence almost unknown and uncared for,” but asserted

it is not true that he is forgotten, or that the largeness of his charity has not been felt . . . in giving to men a broader view of Christianity . . . While some of us may not be in sympathy with his theological views and dogmas, or his want of them, as the case may be, yet we can but admire his nobleness of character, his loving heart for the oppressed, and his great love for all mankind. His unbelief in certain generally accepted statements of theology was, as some of us look at it, a great misfortune. But his heart was much larger than his theology, and his Christianity was of the loving type, that saw in every man a brother to be loved, and helped, whenever help was needed.

By summer 1891 a new headstone had been completed although, according to a brief notice in the New York Times for 23 August, its placing and dedication had been delayed “by the strict regulations of Italy concerning the removal or renovation of monuments to the dead.” Finally, on November 27th, nearly identical reports were published in several US newspapers (one has to wonder if the text was supplied by Theodore Stanton’s news bureau). This one is from the Worcester Daily Spy:

Theodore Parker’s Monument
Honors to One of America’s Greatest Divines

Florence, Italy, Nov. 26. – this afternoon there was unveiled in the old Protestant cemetery in this city, in the presence of a select body of American and English residents and United States Consul Long, the new headstone at the grave of Rev. Theodore Parker, which was erected with subscriptions collected by Theodore Stanton, among the distinguished European and American admirers of the celebrated Boston divine. The monument and medallion of Mr. Parker, by W.W. Story of Rome, are of white marble. The inscription is by Moncure D. Conway. The headstone, covered by the American flag, was unveiled by Miss Grace Ellery Channing, grand-daughter of Dr. Channing, who read a sonnet in honor of Mr. Parker, written for the occasion by Mr. Story. The orator of the day, Hon. Charles K. Tuckerman, formerly United States minister to Greece, delivered an admirable address.

One last Open Court essay by Theodore Stanton in December 1891 gave thanks to the “generosity of the distinguished sculptor . . . who would accept of no compensation for the modelling of the excellent medallion of Parker” and to the “efforts of Mr. Moncure D. Conway.” A Virginian who fell under Parker’s influence soon after arriving at Harvard in 1852, Conway helped thirty-three of his father’s escaped slaves settle in Ohio in 1862 and then departed for England to lecture on the evils of slavery in order to discourage British sympathy for the Confederates. Remaining in London as minister of the South Place Chapel (which later became the South Place Ethical Society), Conway wrote in Fortnightly Review that Theodore Parker had transformed the liberal church from “a Boston school to an American faith . . . whenever Unitarianism is planted in the prairies or on the Mississippi, it comes up Parkerism . . . no dogmatic formula, but a spirit of reverent free thought.” The inscription he wrote succinctly encompassed both key aspects of the man whose influence it honored:

THEODORE PARKER
THE GREAT AMERICAN PREACHER
BORN AT LEXINGTON MASSACHUSETTS
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
AUGUST 24 1810
DIED AT FLORENCE ITALY
MAY 10 1860

HIS NAME IS ENGRAVED IN MARBLE
HIS VIRTUES IN THE HEARTS OF THOSE HE
HELPED TO FREE FROM SLAVERY
AND SUPERSTITION

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Weiss, John. Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker. 2 vols. New York: Appleton, 1864.
“Wendell Phillips on Theodore Parker,” New York Times, 2 June 1860 (ProQuest Historical Newspapers).
“The Wife of Theodore Parker,” Springfield Daily Republican, 13 April 1881 (America’s Historical Newspapers).
“The Will of Theodore Parker,” New York Times, 4 July 1860 (ProQuest Historical Newspapers).

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III. Hiram Powers and Joel T. Hart
Ted Gantz/ Virtual Paper

I believe the following approach to Hiram Powers and Robert Hart as a combined presentation would offer an opportunity to introduce Powers with some freshness, setting him against Hart who is little known. There are common themes which run through the story of both sculptors, Cincinnati, Nicholas Longworth, Florence, friendship and the inventive curiosity. With side issues such as Fanny Trollope, which play to the interests of the ‘English’ Cemetery.

I have known Hiram Powers' work since my art school/museum school days since so much of his work is in Cincinnati. Also I have written and been involved with researching his life for the past twenty or more years. So my perception is of a sculptor relatively well known with a substantial body of publications exploring his life.

I have a file on Hart and photographs of his work, which are part of my ongoing research of the nineteenth century sculptors evolving out of Cincinnati. The only art historian with any published work is a master thesis by David Dearinger, from 1983. He subsequently published two articles in Kentucky journals in the 1990’s. Reviewing this and all of the remaining published material I would say Hart is only known through very limited study. The sculptures by Hart are mostly found in Kentucky and the archived letters in Louisville and Chicago are easy enough for me to access.

From what I can see the contrasts of Powers to Hart are intriguing. They were friends, had similar interests in their sculpture, they were both inventors, Hart made Powers' death mask. I think the paper showing Powers a success and Hart a struggling sculptor will make an interesting presentation.
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IV. Jennie's Gift: The Early Purchases of French Imprints for the Daniel Willard Fiske Petrarch Collection.
Patrick J. Stevens, Curator of the Fiske Collections and Selector for Jewish Studies, Cornell University/ Virtual Paper

Neither Daniel Willard Fiske nor Jennie McGraw is to be found among the Americans who repose in the "English" Cemetery of Florence and thus contribute to the remarkable history of the place and the city. Abolitionist in spirit, Fiske would have been well acquainted with many of these American names. However, Fiske's association with Florence is that of a consummate book collector who, recently bereft of Jennie McGraw after their brief marriage, settled in the city in 1883, acquiring Walter Savage Landor's Villa Gherardesca in San Domenico, and bringing to near perfection his collections on Iceland, chess, Dante, Petrarch and Rhaeto-Romance.

This narrative traces the genesis of the Petrarch Collection, particularly the acquisition of early French translations, during the last weeks of Jennie's life.