The Solace Project #13

Art and Nature change my mind.

Dear Friends,

I hope you had a good week, got outside on a walk every day, maybe went to a museum or botanical garden.  Seems that everyone was so filled with solace and the transformational power of art and nature that no one caught my error last week. Last Sunday, I offered to talk about a magnificent portrait of a mother and child for Mother’s Day, thinking that today was the day. Of course, it’s next Sunday. No harm done. First of all, we all know the feeling of blursday, during this past year as one day mushed into the next without the routines and markers that distinguish one day from the next--no commuting, no proper shoes, no plans with friends, the kids at home every day, all meals consumed in the same place--it has been easy to mistake Thursday for Monday and Saturday for Tuesday

I could talk about mothers and children every day, everyday is mother’s day, I do call mine every day--you’ll recall my post from a few weeks ago when I drove all the way to Chicago to be with her during Easter week. So let’s talk about Elizabeth Clarke Freake and her baby Mary today and then about more mamas next week.

To reach this remarkable painting, most of you will look here on the post or search for her name, but please allow me to be a bit nostalgic for travel and remember that the best route to the Worcester Art Museum is on a walk through Institute Park, along Salisbury Pond. If we had more time--oh right we do because we’re doing this in our minds--I would actually walk through Rural Cemetery, Worcester’s first garden cemetery filled with lovely memorials and flowers and shrubs and trees to honor those gone, showing respect and affection. Mount Auburn Cemetery in nearby Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the first garden cemetery in America, a subject unto itself for those of us who find peace and beauty, art and nature in our country’s historic graveyards.  For those of you who may find cemeteries creepy, my apologies, I digress, but we are walking in our minds, along the winding paths of Rural Cemetery, crossing Grove Street to enter Institute Park, finding the path along he pond, shaped much like the Serpentine in London, and around to Salisbury Street.  The Worcester Art Museum is just two short blocks east, and by now, if this is your first trip to Worcester and you’re curious like me you’ll be asking “why is everything called Salisbury?” Because three generations of Salisburys, all named Stephen, built up Worcester’s economy, culture, and health care over the course of a century, from about the time of the American Revolution to 1884, when the third of the Stephens died and left everything he had to the city.  I’ll admit that I’ve done no research into these Stephens, I’m more fascinated by the second Stephen’s wife Elizabeth Tuckerman Salisbury--smart and civic minded, her portrait by Gilbert Stuart is also in the museum--and laughed when I read that the reason Stephen three had no heirs was because as a “life-long bachelor, he reportedly preferred the company of his horse.”  There is a story in there somewhere, but for someone else to mine and tell.  

My story, all received knowledge from dear colleagues over a long period of time, revolves around just how continuously fascinated I have been and still am about the portrait of Mary Freake and Baby. The Worcester Art Museum has a fantastic self-guided exhibition on the theme of femininity and portrayals of women from early modern Europe. I sort of wonder why Elizabeth Freake’s portrait didn’t make the cut, I suppose because it’s technically American or English, in any event not European, although I’ve heard many people say it looks Dutch. If I were teaching a survey of American painting now, I would try to make sense of all of this, start with her, just as I always did, the signal work that the arts had found their way into the dank and dismal shores of Massachusetts, and try again to figure out who painted her, where they were from, where they trained, what they knew. An impossible task for sure, we still call this painter the Freake Limner because of the fame of these portraits. Oh, Limner means someone who limns, in other words someone who paints faces.  It’s quite telling that within less than a century of colonial life in America, after food, clothing, shelter were more than provided, portraits and painted furniture would be wanted.  And got. Make no mistake, have another look at Mary’s portrait, she had everything, and most of it imported from mother England on one of her husband John’s merchant voyages. But more than any of that, the portrait formed social rank, hierarchy, and the most profound and philosophical concept of, as the brilliant historian Marcia Pointon put it, “the relationship between the self as art and the self in art.”

Allow me to propose Mary Freake as an example and get us to some close looking, my favorite thing: She is in the picture, of course, sitting there on an ornate, high-backed side chair upholstered with shiny brass tacks and rich tassels. A red drape regally hangs above her. She wears an inventory of pearls, silks, laces, and embroidery, with layers and layers of her green dress, red underskirt, white apron, all bunched and folded so that we can get a sense of the volume of fabric that adorns her. Her baby stands on her lap, just as beautifully dressed, and holds it’s left hand against her right breast, a gesture that always makes me sigh and then makes me wonder if the child is mischievously pulling at the corseted center seam of mama’s closed-vest dress. Mother steadies the baby with her left hand on the belly and right fingers curled around the shoulder. While we swoon at the gentleness between them, please do pause to take in mama’s thumb ring and bracelet. They look alike, dark eyes, red lips, blonde hair, round faces with big rosy cheeks, pronounced chins, high foreheads, they both epitomize beauty at the time. And let’s be honest, for many of us looking for the first time: how is that baby standing? Where is the shape of the mother and how is she sitting on that chair? The inventory of goods, including the human beings is literally described on the canvas without any three dimensional form.  This is why, at least for me, the gestures between mother and child are so profoundly touching: the artist has captured the feeling when there are no palpable humans present.  Or as I started out, mother and child are in the art.  

Equally or more interesting is how they are of the art. For me, being of something relates to possessions. And I could cut to the chase, ok I will, and say that Elizabeth Clarke Freake and her baby are the prized possessions of John Freake. 

His portrait hangs nearby in the gallery, I’ve always thought him a rather dastardly figure in his black velvet suit, loads of jewelry, lace collar and cuffs, a pencil moustache. Have a close look at him, the way he holds the white gloves in his right hand so that all of the fingers curl upon one another, fifteen fingers--five his and ten fabric--clawing at something. For most of my career, I taught this portrait as a triumph of expressive wealth, confidence, inventory of goods, subtle character, complex hand gestures. That’s all true, and it’s interesting to me now that I look at him and I wonder. There is something about him that I missed when I was focused on the primacy of a professional portrait tradition cooking up in Boston in the 17th century. To me, it’s a general feeling of smugness and ego, and I don’t have to like him in order to appreciate the fact that this polished painting even existed in colonial America at the time. Thankfully, scholars at Worcester got to work on him and others and in 2018 they revealed which of the sitters in portraits throughout the collection had ties to slavery. Sure enough John Freake’s personal inventory of 1675 listed six ships, land, property, clothing, furniture, and a “Negroe named Coffee.” 

No surprises here, the sort of research I am relieved to say is going on across American art museum collections. As for Elizabeth and baby Mary, I’m now connecting the dots from these new findings back to evidence on these portraits that emerged awhile ago. Conservation x-rays--yes the same that you or I would have taken but in this case the digital electronics see through paint layers--tell us that both of the Freake portraits were re-worked. As for John, the painter returned to give him more schwag, jewelry, buttons, and overall glitz. He is of the art, literally enhanced in a picture. 

For Elizabeth, well, she got baby Mary. The artist literally moved her arms, shifted her dress, added ribbons to her sleeves, took off some jewelry, and put a year-old baby on her lap. Mama. Elizabeth is of the art, part of the creative process, a creator, and also part of her husband’s inventory, a celebration of family that in its recording on canvas became part of John’s possessions. 

Take a Walk

I hiked this week in Fahnestock Park, the Charcoal Burner’s Trail, which got my friend and me laughing hysterically when we could remember the features--a beaver dam, thickets of mountain laurel, high bush blueberry, rocks that raise above the tree canopy, lakes and rivers and swamps created by rain--but couldn’t recall the name: Iron Oven? Burning Tree? Coal Mountain? We figured it out, of course, smartie-pants hikers like us have maps, but the conjuring of names and history attached just reminds me how the event of walking or hiking does make me want to learn more about why things are named as they are. On Fahnestock, named for Clarence, who died in the World War I flu pandemic, a doctor treating patients. His brother Ernest, also a doctor, bought 2400 acres and created a memorial. The charcoal burners were the men who felled trees in that area to create charcoal for heating. 

Take a walk, notice the name of the road or trail or path and figure it out. 

And Onward

Ok next week for the second Mother’s Day, let’s go to the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. We can take a walk through the garden, check out their new exhibition of contemporary art, and find our way to Mary Anna Whiting Boardman and her Son, William Whiting Boardman by Ralph Earl, and talk about motherhood, orange silk satin, and what child  is holding.

One more thing: Are we friends? Do you follow me? Please do @carriereborabarratt and I’ll follow you back,

Until then, keep walking and looking, slowly and with curiosity and courage,

Warmly,

Carrie