History, Natural History & the Arts
Ezra Ames was born on May 5th, 1768 in Framingham, Massachusetts. He was the fourth child of Jesse Emes and Betty Bent.
Prior to the 1800s, printed documents were scarce and there was usually no generally accepted spelling for many words. Most words were written phonetically; whatever combination of letters caused a person to say the intended word was accepted. [Read more…] about Albany Artist Ezra Ames: A Biography
The New York Art Crime Team of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) recently returned two paintings by 19th-century portrait artist Ammi Phillips to Historic Huguenot Street (HHS).
The two portraits, depicting prominent New Paltz residents Dirck D. Wynkoop (1738-1827) and his wife Annatje Eltinge (1748-1827), were missing for fifty years, after they were stolen on February 16th, 1972 while on display at the 1799 Ezekiel Elting (aka LeFevre) House on Huguenot Street. [Read more…] about Paintings Stolen 50 Years Ago Returned to Historic Huguenot Street
The American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine, as early as 1829, had pictures of noted horses, engraved by well-known steel-gravers from paintings by Alvan Fisher [1792-1863] and J. Cone [possibly J. Cone Ruitiar]. A few years later the New York Spirit of the Times was issuing engravings from paintings principally by Edward Troye [1808-1874].
It all amounts to a gallery of horse notables: Fashion, Glencoe, Lightning, Shark, Leviathan, Monarch, and down the list. There are interesting side-lights on the costume of the boys holding their equine charges, one with an Eton jacket and a cap much like that worn by the American troops during the Mexican War, another brave in Hessian boots and epaulets. It is, however, principally the quicker lithographic process that pictured His Majesty the Horse. [Read more…] about American Sporting Prints: 19th Century Horses & Horsemen
In the late 1700s and early 1800s, there were a growing number of adventurers anxious to explore the sea, find new lands, chart new islands, and if they made their fortune while doing it, all the better.
There were also those just trying to get away from home and signing on to a whaling ship seemed the adventure of a lifetime. [Read more…] about James Eights: An Albany Artist-Scientist Who Explored Antarctica in 1830
![Edward Lange, [Northport, Lower Main Street], 1880 from the Collection of Preservation Long Island](https://www.newyorkalmanack.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Edward-Lange-Northport-Lower-Main-Street-1880-from-the-Collection-of-Preservation-Long-Island-scaled.jpg)
Preservation Long Island has announced the Art of Edward Lange Project, a collaborative effort to reexamine the life and art of Edward Lange (1846–1912), a German immigrant and prolific landscape painter who worked in and around Huntington, Long Island during the 1870s and 1880s. Lange sketched and painted town centers, local businesses, and private residences. [Read more…] about Art of Edward Lange Project Launched With Website, Events
Until the mid-1860s the Fifth Avenue area around Madison Square was Manhattan’s “aristocratic” heart. Its brownstone mansions were occupied by the city’s elite. The gradual incursion of commerce into this residential haven started with high-class hotels.
In 1864 Hoffmann House was one of the first to open its doors. Owned by Cassius H. Read, it was located on the corner of 25th Street & Broadway and contained tree hundred rooms with all the latest conveniences. The establishment proudly advertised its lavish furnishings, carefully chosen artworks, and refined French (Parisian) cuisine. At a time that hotel living was becoming a fashionable alternative to owning a family mansion for wealthy New Yorkers, Hoffmann House was recommended as the most comfortable and homelike residence in the metropolis.
During the 1880s the hotel’s “grand salon” became one of New York’s “secretive” attractions for a very specific reason. [Read more…] about Four Nymphs, a Satyr and Manhattan’s Ladies’ Mile
On the April episode of Crossroads of Rockland History we explored the life and artistic legacy of Sidney A. Simon (1917–1997). On the occasion of an exhibition of his works at the Blue Hill Art and Cultural Center (Pearl River, NY), two of Simon’s children, Teru Simon and Mark Simon, joined Clare Sheridan to share memories of their father and their own recollections of growing up on South Mountain Road in Rockland County. [Read more…] about Life and Artistic Legacy of Sidney Simon
Manhattan artist George Deem is remembered for referencing the history of painting by re-imagining Old Masters in a contemporary context. He re-configured iconic pictorial images through visual ploys such as repetition and erasure, or through the addition of components of contemporary life and art. [Read more…] about George Deem, Bulldozers and Stalinist Suppression
The ossuary under the church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini at Via Veneto in Rome houses the skulls and bones of some 4,000 former Capuchin monks who were interred there between 1631 and 1870. The dead were buried without coffin and later exhumed to make room for newly deceased. Their remains were transformed into “decorative designs.”
In the summer of 1867 Mark Twain visited the Capuchin Convent and recorded his observations of the crypt’s “picturesque horrors” in The Innocents Abroad. What the novelist witnessed were arches built of thigh bones; pyramids constructed of “grinning” skulls; and other structures made of shin and arm bones. Walls were decorated with frescoes showing vines produced of knotted vertebrae; tendrils made of sinews and tendons; and flowers formed of knee-caps and toe-nails. [Read more…] about Macabre Mania From Charles Allan Gilbert to Andy Warhol
In spring 1905, painter Hubert Vos received a letter at his Manhattan residence from the Dutch Legation in Peking inquiring if he would be able and willing to travel to China and paint the portrait of a prominent official. The invitation was vague, but too tempting to refuse for a painter who had made the portraiture of racial types his specialty. [Read more…] about Painter Hubert Vos’s ‘Exotic People’: Maastricht to Manhattan and Beyond