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From the Collections
Senior Curator of Library and Archives Lorna Condon and Curator Erica Lome share updates about recent acquisitions to Historic New England’s collections.
In the late nineteenth century, a time when women artists struggled to gain professional recognition, Agnes Augusta Bartlett Brown (1847-1932) became a successful and well-known painter affiliated with the Boston School. Her subjects included landscapes, florals, and domestic animals—particularly cats. Brown traveled widely and exhibited her work at the Boston Art Club, the Paris Salon of 1875, and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. She and her husband, John Appleton Brown, belonged to a cohort of artists known for their impressionistic style, including Childe Hassam and William Morris Hunt. This untitled painting, perhaps inspired by their home in Newburyport, Massachusetts, captures Bartlett Brown’s technique and appreciation for rural landscapes. The donation of Agnes Augusta Bartlett Brown’s painting strengthens Historic New England’s collection of landscape paintings by New England artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and particularly women artists of the same period.
In 1892, Boston architect Robert Swain Peabody (1845-1917) inherited a set of antique painted chairs made between 1795-1799 for his ancestor Elias Hasket Derby (1730-1799) of Salem, Massachusetts. The original Derby chairs featured decorative carved plumes for the back splat, a motif often called a Prince of Wales feather owing to the design’s English origins. While he retained the originals, Peabody also commissioned a set of at least five reproductions from A. H. Davenport Co. for personal use. At the time, A. H. Davenport was a prestigious Boston firm specializing in furniture and interior decoration; their merger with Irving and Casson in 1914 created a design powerhouse that remained active and influential for years to come. Historic New England holds the largest collection of archival material related to Irving and Casson and A. H. Davenport Co., before and after their merger, including watercolors, design drawings, account books, photographs, and ephemera. The object collection contains fewer examples of furniture manufactured by the firms and almost none is as well-documented and well-preserved as this side chair, which retains its original paint color and decoration.
Selection of Ephemera
New England, late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries, Library and Archives Purchase, 2024.
Telling the stories of the day-to-day lives of New Englanders is one of our highest priorities. One way that we do this is by collecting printed and photographic ephemera—invoices, advertisements, postcards, tickets, menus, programs, and greeting cards, among other items— that record the minute details of everyday life in the area. Here are a few examples of recent acquisitions that at the time of their creation might have seemed insignificant but now provide important information about the region’s social history and material culture.
This 8 ¼” advertisement is an elegant endorsement of the New England Boot and Shoe House in Meriden, Connecticut. It is an important addition to our growing collection of ephemera documenting New England’s shoe industry.
C. G. Brown of Readsboro, Vermont, was a door-todoor salesman for the J. R. Watkins Company of Winona, Minnesota. This real photo postcard depicts his company wagon and the horses that pulled it. Founded in 1868, the Watkins Company hired men to sell their health remedies, bath soaks, cough rubs, vitamin supplements, and other items across the country. J. R. Watkins became one of the largest direct sales companies in the United States.
Boston’s Bay State Parcel Checking Company described its green and gold enameled cabinets (patented in 1914) as, “The perfect parcel checking system. Check your suitcase, bag, parcels, umbrella or other hand luggage in your own steel safe deposit box. No discourtesy. No tips. Deposit 10 cents. Lock door and withdraw key…A boon to the commercial traveler. A joy to everyone anywhere.”
