Between Two Worlds

Cyrus Bruce, free man, formerly enslaved, was known for his dapper appearance when he worked at Langdon House in Portsmouth, NH in 1783, yet when artist Richard Haynes embarked on painting his portrait in 2018, no image of Bruce existed.

Haynes created this interpretive portrait of Bruce in an artist's residency and exhibition, A Life in Color: Two Cultural Makers, Centuries Apart at Historic New England’s Langdon House.

“I have the opportunity to capture the image, the portrait of an unknown man and through this, together, we are going to be cultural keepers and makers. We are going to share the black heritage, the forgotten history, through art.” –Richard Haynes Jr.

Learn more about how Richard Haynes creates a portrait
A portrait painted in blocks of bold colors showing a Black man without distinct facial features wearing formal dress standing against the gray wall of a historical room.
A photography portrait of artist Richard Haynes seated at a work desk reviewing concept sketches and images for his painting of Cyrus Bruce.

Queen Slipper City

Historic New England Haverhill Center is located in one of the largest former shoe factories in Haverhill.

In 1900, 40% of the country’s shoes were manufactured in Massachusetts and Haverhill—“the Queen Slipper City”—was the third largest shoe manufacturing city in the United States.

Adapting to changes in fashion and with the advance of organized labor, the Haverhill shoe industry continued to flourish. In 1941, a profile of Haverhill boasted the city as the largest manufacturer of women’s shoes in the US, with over fifty shoe factories in the city, along with other associated businesses in wooden-heel manufacturing and leather tanning.

A pair of high-heeled black shoes with small studded white gems along the heels.

Banned in Boston

Massachusetts banned tattoos in 1962 when a hepatitis break-out in New York was linked to tattoo needles. The ban didn’t stop people from getting tattoos; the whole business went underground, giving tattoos the aura of cool.

Tattooing has been used by Indigenous Americans for thousands of years and for different cultural meanings—tribal identity, life milestones, and healing.

Concept sketch for a tattoo of a sailor standing ashore holding the American flag with a ship in the background.
Concept art for a tattoo of a woman wearing a short dress in front of a bald eagle and the American flag with a banner reading "Young America" hanging from the eagle's mouth.
A black and white photograph of a sailor receiving a tattoo from an artist, with both seated in front of panels advertising tattoo designs.

In Her Own Right

In the early years of the nineteenth century when there were few opportunities for genteel women to earn a living, Clementina Beach and Judith Saunders ran one of New England's elite schools for girls, located in Dorchester, Massachusetts. We do not know whether grateful students commissioned this portrait by Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828) or Beach commissioned it herself. In either case it is an unusually early portrait of a woman who was painted not because of who her family was but for what she herself had achieved.

While the Mrs. Saunders and Miss. Beach's Academy is relatively well known, little is known about the private lives of the two women. However, Judith Foster Saunders’s great-nephew makes clear that their relationship was one of loving companionship:

"...the perfect harmony that existed between them, through so many years, which grew even more affectionate in their old age, is a pleasant memory to those who witnessed it."

ID: Portrait of a young woman with curly brown hair, a soft rosy complexion, and a white dress with puffed sleeves and a ruffled collar.

Memento in Hair

Hairwork, the weaving of hair into mementos and jewelry, like the bracelet seen here, was popularized in the nineteenth century as a way to celebrate love and friendship. The fashion later evolved into memorializing the dearly departed.

Once the purview of skilled craftspeople, hairwork became a Victorian pastime, with instruction manuals and patterns published for at-home use.

ID: A golden hair bracelet weaved with interlocking segments of gold chain and sold gold with a smaller gold chain attached and hanging underneath

Soul Inspired

Vermont-born sculptor Hiram Powers moved to Florence in 1837 to solidify his training. His studio there attracted a loyal clientele of travelers from New England, among them Nathaniel Hawthorne, who rhapsodized when he saw this bust:

 

“A light seems to shine from the interior of the marble and beam forth from the features.”

 

The figure is Psyche, a Greek goddess personifying the human soul.

The sculpture is on view at Historic New England’s Codman Estate in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

ID: A photograph of the full statue of the Bust of Psyche. It is a marble statue depicting the bare bust of a slender woman with soft features and ringlets in her hair. A black pillar supports the sculpture in a room with a blue wall, a patterned blue and yellow vase to the left, and a green plant to the right.
ID: A photograph of the Bust of Psyche. It is a marble statue depicting the bare bust of a slender woman with soft features and ringlets in her hair.

Adaptive Enterprise

This Navajo rug was purchased in 1906 by a visitor to Wyoming.

In the early twentieth century, Indigenous American goods became popular due to both an interest in handcrafts and, ironically, the subjugation of Indigenous American tribes.

Indigenous Americans, deprived of their land resources, created successful enterprises with craftwork, including rugmaking and basketry.

This rug is on view at Historic New England’s Castle Tucker in Wiscasset, Maine.

A woven red rug patterned with black and white diamonds and triangles and a black and white border.
A woven red rug patterned with black and white diamonds and triangles laid on a wooden floor.

Girl Entrepreneurs

 

The Paul Revere Pottery sprung from a literary club for Jewish and Italian immigrant girls of high school age, the Saturday Evening Girls Club, started by librarian Edith Guerrier, her partner, Edith Brown, an artist, and philanthropist Helen Storrow.

Guerrier and Brown established the pottery business so that the girls could earn income.

The items produced in the Paul Revere Pottery were in the arts and crafts movement-inspired pottery tradition characterized by simple shapes with boldly colored glazes and stylized images of nature.

ID: A clay vase and bowl. The vase depicts orange tulips with green stems, leaves, and grass on a brown background with a blue sky, The bowl depicts white ducks with tall green grass between each duck on a brown background and blue sky.

Icon of Modernism

Walter Gropius, founder of the German design school known as the Bauhaus, was one of the most influential architects of the twentieth century.

Escaping Nazi Germany, he designed Gropius House as his family home when he came to teach architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

Historic New England preserves his home in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and many of the household objects he designed.

An angular, modernist white teapot next to two smaller black teapots of similar style.
Two angular stools each made of two pieces of wood joined together just below the seat.
An exterior view of Gropius House, a white modernist home with squared-off walls and a flat roof.

Flight to Freedom

Captured in eastern Africa at about the age of ten, Pedro Tovookan Parris created this autobiographical watercolor on linen fabric showing his progression from captivity as an enslaved African to his life as a freedman in America.

We have no way of knowing the circumstance under which Pedro drew this picture of his journey, but it seems clear he was driven to record his life. Perhaps, forcibly separated from his family, the stories and watercolors in some small measure served to remind Pedro who he was.

A black and white photography portrait of Pedro Tovookan Parris wearing formal dress in an ornate frame.
A length of linen with watercolor depictions of a building with a tall steeple and soldiers marching outside to the left, a boat in the center, and houses and people on a shoreline on the right.

Eye for the Big Picture

Baldwin Coolidge (1845-1928) was a leading professional photographer in New England from the late 1870s until 1917. With his large-format cameras, he recorded urban life and architecture in Boston and other New England cities, coastal and marine views in Massachusetts and Maine, pastoral scenes in New Hampshire, and events such as floods, fires, and storms throughout the region. He also worked for thirty years as staff photographer at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Coolidge maintained a summer studio on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. His photograph of the Wreck of the Warren Sawyer was made on Nantucket, Massachusetts, in 1885. He documented the Stony Brook Flood in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1886.

ID: A black and white photograph of a shipwreck. A woman in dark dress and light hat with braided hair looks at the remains of the bow of the ship on the edge of a beach.
ID: A photograph of a flooded street in Roxbury, MA in the late 1800s. Men in suits and hats can be seen standing in the water that's as high as their knees while some use rowboats and another finds shelter by standing on a lamp pole.