Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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