The event poster, designed by my colleague in the deerskin breeches! You’ll be joining us, right?
Tag: Rhode Island
Animal Apples
The neighborhood where we live is part of the old rural past of our college town: it’s up the hill from the oldest settlement area, and slopes downhill to a plateau that runs out towards the other river, where the land drops precipitously. The house we live in was built in the 1920s, about the time of the junior high school and the stadium below us. The streets are named for the people who settled and farmed here, and two of the early houses remain, one frame and one stone.
Even into the 1940s, there was a dairy farm in this area, and a milk wagon; paintings from the first quarter of the twentieth century show an orchard named for one of the settlers, and there’s possible physical evidence of an earlier existence: apple trees in the verge around the corner from us.
I don’t know if these are new trees or old, though apple trees can live a long time. Well established and productive, the apples look like Paula Reds, but then again, so do Devonshire Quarrendens. (Paulas are a 1968 apple introduction, based on McIntosh apples.) What I do know is that they’re early season and good for eating, though we don’t like to pick too many: it feels like stealing, though no one ever seems to picks them. Mr S finally heard why: they’re Animal Apples.
A man and his son were on bikes at the corner under the tree; the man told his son the apples were not for eating: “Those aren’t for people. Those are animal apples.”
Those apples are delicious, and if it didn’t feel like stealing, I’d go up there with a basket. So many go to waste, and I suppose it’s because people have this “animal apple” idea.
There’s good foraging in the city, if you look, blackberries and raspberries in scrub ground, the apple trees, and the lettuce I let go to seed that flourished in the cracks of the walk down the side of our house. The idea that apples on a city tree aren’t for people is sad. I ate mulberries off the tree in our yard in Chicago, where we grew rhubarb in the yard that fronted a busy street.
I don’t know what I find most disturbing about Animal Apples: the possibility that we’re so far removed from food that people can’t tell the difference between eating apples and ornamental apples, or that we’re so far from where our food originates that we fear anything that’s not assembled, processed, or obviously tamed and presented for our consumption.
The Pleasure of Your Company
Friday afternoon we did a photo shoot at work for promotional materials for our upcoming What Cheer! Day program on Saturday, October 5. We’ll be occupying the house in first person for a day, with members of the Brown family and their servants. I think we’re all a little overwhelmed by the prospect of playing real characters about whom we know less than we’d like, but too much not to pay attention to.
There are a lot of details in building a character, and I’m very lucky to be playing the housekeeper, who really is anonymous. We know the names of some of the servants, but not all. It’s liberating, but it’s also making a character up out of the whole cloth. This just means imagining someone new, and that’s where the aspiring fiction writer in me gets to play.
I’ve written about the process here and here, and there will be more to come. But for now, we request the pleasure of your company on Saturday October 5, where you can learn what secrets those maids know, and find out why the gentleman in the blue coat so hates the man in the green coat.
Thinking Ralph Earl
In three weeks, I start a three week cycle of events in different decades: Saratoga in 1777 will be followed by Boston in 1763, followed by Providence in 1800. This causes a kind of temporal whiplash, though I know well enough what I should wear for 1777 and 1763, and Mr S’s brown coat will cut out this week so I can begin to sew on Saturday.
Providence in 1800 worries me more, but last Saturday’s conversation with Sharon helped immensely, especially when she said, Think Ralph Earl. So simple, I was embarrassed not to have remembered one of my favorite painters.
I need to think below Ralph Earl’s sitter’s station, but as Mrs Brown’s housekeeper or bossiest maid, these portraits represent the type of people I see, people who live in Providence but aren’t the Browns. Ralph Earl’s world of Connecticut merchants and ministers is much like the world I would see. How much more cosmopolitan was Providence than Stonington or New London? They’re all ports, and Providence is busier, but I think that Ralph Earl is a safe bet for understanding the visual context of the southern New England in the 1790s and the styles people wore.
It is especially helpful because he painted women of about the right age. Mrs Canfield at the top of te page was born in 1760, so she’s just a little younger than my character.
Mrs Ellsworth was born in 1756, so she’s a little bit older. Different ages, different styles (yes, styles have also changed between 1792 and 1796). But some constants: long, slim sleeves. White caps and handkerchiefs, layered at the neck. Silk–though that won’t be me–in solid, slightly muted colors.
There’s another Connecticut painter worth looking at: John Brewster, Jr. In this New Republic period, I think it’s really critical to look to American sources for clues to how people projected themselves, how they were seen and wanted to be seen. This is pretty high-falutin’ stuff for a maid, but I’m presuming that I know how to read (because John Brown and his brothers placed an emphasis on education in their own families, and on public education). And if I know how to read, and I work in a house with books and political discussions, chances are good that even in the late 18th century, I have eavesdropped on the discussions and I have read at least the newspapers. I’m living in a certain atmosphere, and how I dress and what I think about will reflect the world around me.
Dr. John Brewster, seen here with his second wife, Ruth, descended from William Brewster. His wife, Ruth, is obviously literate. These people are signaling education and sensibility to us: sober, well to do, respectable. Brewster is not as good a painter as Ralph Earl, so fabric is harder to read. What is her gown made of? Could be fine wool, could be silk: hard to tell. But see that little edge of shift peeking below that three-quarter sleeve? That’s old school for 1795. But I like the neckline and the color. Burnley & Trowbridge have a light-weight wool that color…
Brewster’s portrait of Lucy Knapp Mygatt and her son, painted in 1799, does, I think, help push the date for the Brewster double portrait earlier: by 1799, the painter in more accomplished and bolder in the full-length portrait. He’s also learned to render fabric somewhat more convincingly.
Long sleeves, white cap and kerchief, high waistline: the styles are consistent, but as you move through the subtleties of class, the expression of the style shifts. Front-closing round gown with a waistline that’s high, but lower than what I’ve made in the past, with long sleeves: settled. Now all I need to decide upon is fabric: probably a lightweight, dark-colored wool, though I haven’t found exactly what I want yet.
Kirsten Hammerstrom 
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