Newport Historical Society

Newport Mercury, December 23, 2009

Collection 2009: Five Newport Cultural, Historic and Arts Institutions Pick Their Favorite Gifts Received This Year

By Janine Weisman

‘THE OTHER HESSIAN PAINTING’
To: Newport Historical Society
From: Mary Gall

No one knows the name of the artist who created the oil painting depicting Washington Square as seen from the steps of the Colony House in 1818. But local lore has it he was a Hessian soldier said to have done time in debtor’s prison. The painting may have even been how he got out. Now it hangs in the Muse­um of Newport History in the Brick Market, the 1762 building featured very prominently in the painting.

One day last spring, Newport Historical Society Executive Director Ruth Taylor received a phone call from a Pennsylva­nia woman informing her she had “the other Hessian paint­ing.” The woman was Mary Gall, whose maternal grandmother had been an art and antiques collector in Newport. Taylor drove to Gall’s Gladwyne, Pa., home to see the 21 x 30.5 inch oil painting and found it looked just like the one the society already owns except for the color palette. The society’s painting depicts a sunny day in 1818 while cloudy skies hovered over the scene in Gall’s. But the groupings of townspeople in the scene — including a little boy and his wheelbarrow in the lower left corner and the three ladies in white promenading with others on the lower right — are the same.

Were these two paintings done by the same artist? “You could make a case either way, in my opinion,” Taylor said. “You can picture two people sitting side-by-side and looking over each other’s shoulder.”

That mystery led the historical society’s staff to choose Gall’s gift as their favorite of the 37 donation lots received in 2009. The painting was restored through the generosity of board member and fine art dealer Roger King and eventually will be hung next to its sunny-day twin.

“This is forcing us to do more research,” said Taylor, who has been combing through the 1818 editions of Mercury in the soci­ety’s collection searching for news of who had been sent to debtor’s prison or who had gotten out of it.

“The great thing about Newport is yeah, I think we’re going to find the answer.”

On February 18th, 2010, Joe Baker of the Newport Daily News reported on our new walking tour. This tour focuses on the Kay-Catherine area of Newport, and the colony of artists, writers and intellectuals who lived and summered in Newport in the mid-19th century.

Read the article here.

Jacqueline Marque — Daily News staff photos

 From The Newport Daily News

October 10 and 11, 2009

Long-lost historic gravestone is recovered

The footstone from the grave of Anne Hutchinson’s granddaughter was taken years ago from Newport’s Common Buying Ground

By Sean Flynn, Daily News Staff

Newport – The footstone that marked the grave of Ann Vernon, a granddaughter of Portsmouth founder Anne Hutchinson, was returned anonymously to the Newport Historical Society this summer after being removed from the Common Burying Ground sometime in the past.

“Some good citizen discovered it on Second Beach in Middletown,” said Ruth S. Taylor, the society’s executive director.

Local historian Bert Lippincott, the society’s reference librarian, said the discovery highlights how the historic cemetery has been plundered and vandalized over the years.

“We’ve had gravestones from Newport found as far away as Hopkintown,” he said. “Over the years, they have been used as doorsteps, walkways and even septic tank covers.”

Taylor said she would talk to cemetery experts and any heirs of Vernon who might be available to determine if the footstone is in the public domain.

“It’s an interesting dilemma,” she said. “The stones are owned by the family, but who has stewardship? If we work with the city to return it to the cemetery, it creates an opportunity for it to be stone again. Something this size is too easily picked up and taken away.”

John Stevens, a stonemason who opened a shop on Thames Street in 1705 and carved gravestones, carved Vernon’s footstone, Lippincott said.

“From the execution and the date, we know it must have been carved by Stevens,” he said. “At the time, there were no other stonecutters in the area.”

The footstone has a carved angel’s head at the top and is decorated on the sides with rosettes and vines, trademarks of the Stevens shop that is still located at 29 Thames St. and is believed to be the oldest continuously operating business in America.

Vernon’s headstone remains in the Common Burying Ground, in a plot of land reserved for Vernon family members. Her gravestone, just three stones away from Warner Street, says: “Ann, wife of Daniel Vernon and daughter of Capt. Edward Hutchinson, born 1643, died Jan. 10, 1716.”

Edward Hutchinson was Anne Hutchinson’s first-born child, Lippincott said.

Vernon’s husband’s gravestone is next to hers; it says Daniel Vernon also was born in 1643. He died in 1715.

“He was in 1658 the first clerk of King’s town and in 1686, marshal of King’s Province, Narragansett,” the gravestone says.

Vernon was his wife’s second husband. She previously was married to Samuel Dyer, who died in 1678, Lippincott said.

Her gravestone is one of the earliest original stones in the cemetery to include the father’s name, according to reference material in the Newport Historical Society. At the time, many of the graves had smaller footstones as well as the large headstones.

If the recovered stone isn’t returned to the cemetery, Taylor would like to display it, she said, along with the description of Vernon, her grandmother and the Stevens shop. Such a display could call attention to the resources of the Common Burying Ground, and explore what can be done to improve stewardship of the cemetery, Taylor said.

Some of the stones have been knocked over in past years and have sunk into the ground, Lippincott said.

Anne Hutchinson held Bible meetings for women in the Massachusetts Bay Colony that soon had great appeal to men, as well. Eventually, she went beyond Bible study to proclaim her own theological interpretations of sermons, some of which offended the colony leadership and she was banished.

Hutchinson established a settlement at the northern end of Aquidneck Island, then called Pocasset, with some of her followers. She is considered a key figure in the study of the development of religious freedom in the American colonies and the history of women in ministry. She moved in 1643 with her younger children to an isolated wooded area on Long Island Sound in New York, where Native Americans massacred her, her family and their servants. Hutchinson’s 10-year-old daughter, Susannah, survived the attack. Her older children, including Edward, had remained in Massachusetts, where his wife, Catherine, gave birth to Ann the year her grandmother died.

Cover of The Newport Mercury, August 19, 2009

The Newport Mercury, August 19, 2009

A RARE PUBLIC EXHIBIT UNVEILS FANCIFUL CLOTHING WORN BY COLONIAL NEWPORTERS

By Jennifer Nicole Sullivan

As Great Britain squeezed its American colonies in the 1760s and ’70s leading up to America’s war for independence, revolutionary era women squeezed their breasts into corset-like underwear but liberated their cleavage at the top of their elegant gowns.

Maybe revolutionary bosoms weren’t as tortured as it sounds, but political unrest in the colonies certainly did affect the social fabric of the times — its fashion. In a new Newport Historical Society exhibit, Homespun to High Fashion, visitors can see a fascinating sampling of clothing from the late 18th to early 19th centuries on display in the newly restored Seventh Day Baptist Meeting House.

Guest curator Rebecca Kelly was awed by all the fine, Newport-linked, American Revolutionary era pieces she discovered while delicately digging through hundreds of items in the Newport Historical Society ’s little-before-seen collection of historic clothing stored in acid-free boxes on the second floor of the society ’s Touro Street office.

“Just their age, it’s quite spectacular,” said Kelly, who works at The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology and teaches at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City. “It’s sort of daunting to take a dress out of a box and it’s over 200 years old.”

Set in one of the nation’s oldest Baptist churches, built in 1730, the exhibit gives a rare glimpse of life in our fledgling country and how, even in the midst of a war for independence fought on American soil, Newporters still knew how to look good. Beautiful, full-length, high-fashion gowns worn by wealthier women dating 1765 to 1785 comprise most of the exhibit.

“We were really surprised to see so many high styled gowns. I think that speaks to the economic stability in the early days,” Kelly said.

Never mind the homespun movement where revolutionary era women would weave their own cloth instead of importing British textiles or garments — wealthy Newporters still had their local dressmakers use fine British silk — most likely imported from London’s Spitalfields area — to construct sophisticated gowns that would have been fashionable in Europe. All of the dresses are open-gown, or open-robe style, meaning that the front of the dress is split to reveal an outer petticoat that often matched the dress and could be interchanged with different colored or textured petticoats. The older gowns feature stomachers, a decorative panel that filled a gap in the gown’s bodice.

Stomachers went out of style by the late 1780s, so the later gowns simply closed in the middle of the bodice with pins. Layers of clothing underneath the dress, such as a whalebone-ribbed stay (a precursor to the corset) and a shift (durable linen underwear that resembled a nightgown), protected the women from getting pricked by pins.

Stays provided support to the breasts much like a modern bra, but unlike corsets in the Civil War or the Victorian period, women of the revolutionary era didn’t pull their stays uncomfortably snug to strive for a tiny waist. The structured undergarment improved women’s postures. To maintain modesty during the day, women wore a fichu (pronounced fee-shoo), or handkerchief, around their necks, tucked into the top of the bodice to hide their cleavage. In the evening, they would ditch it, giving liberty to their décolletage.

“They were creating an idealized female form, which was cone-shaped from the waist up,” said Ruth Taylor, the society ’s Executive Director. As for the waist down, Taylor added, “ You could hide a kid under there.”

Under the skirt, women wore padding in a hoop structure that tied around the waist and layers of petticoats to dramatically poof out the hips and buttocks. As for panties, revolutionary women sort of went commando. “Underwear as we think of it today is really modern in its arrival … a 20th century kind of thing,” Kelly said. “So really, for men, they didn’t have anything other than an undershirt which was really long. For women it was many layers of cotton petticoats … not anything comparable to modern undergarments.”

Two of the dresses can be traced to prominent Newport families: a multi-colored floral brocade gown circa 1765 was likely worn by a woman of the Robinson family and an ivory and taupe geometric striped gown with a lavender quilted petticoat circa 1775 is said to have been worn by Catherine Malbone of the wealthy merchant family. In stark contrast to the evening gowns is a coffee colored Quaker dress circa 1775, possibly made with a wool/ silk blend and homespun linen lining (cotton was very rare). The simple dress is a style that Newport Quaker women would have worn through the late 1770s. A men’s outfit with an ornate waistcoat embroidered with silver thread dating from the early 19th century rounds out the display.

Kelly and interns Jennifer Robinson and Kaitlin Morton Bentley — both University of Rhode Island grads — made reproductions of stomachers, padding, fichus and men’s breeches to fill in missing wardrobe pieces or items too deteriorated to display. Some of the mannequin’s heads are topped with huge white, bouffant wigs that the interns modeled after period fashion plates and constructed from raffia and acid-free spider tissue paper.

“If you’ve seen the latest Marie Antoinette movie, in France, some of the hairdos were gigantic,” said MortonBentley. “ They weren’t quite as large here, but for a really formal event, they would have done a nice updo with rolls, powdered their hair and perhaps even had a wig.”