Drawing by Thomas Fogarty, originally published in Collier’s on February 9, 1901.
Fogarty (1873-1938) imagines a group of female well-wishers paying Lincoln their respects on his birthday. Girls and a fashionable lady cluster affectionately about the president, who holds a beaming child on his arm.
Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Click here to learn more.
As ice-skating became a leading pastime in the 1860s, pictures of ice-skating and ice-skaters proliferated in the popular press, recording its impact on society. Looking at such pictures, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that skating represented something special in the lives of women, while also violating existing norms. If skating let women escape a certain social confinement, it rendered them more vulnerable, too. Ice-skating, though fun and bold, exposed women to certain perils, among them a mixing of classes and sexes that nineteenth-century society was set up to avoid.
This print by Winslow Homer (1836-1910) encapsulates such strains. Continue reading
The winter of 1856 was one of the coldest in the nineteenth century. It was so cold that the Ohio River froze solid from bank to bank, creating a path for southern slaves to escape, just as Harriet Beecher Stove had envisioned in Uncle Tom’s Cabin two years before. Elsewhere, the long stretches of cold weather created favorable conditions for Americans’ new favorite pastime, ice-skating, then enjoying great burst of popularity.
This scene, of city-dwellers crowding the ice on the Delaware River in Philadelphia, furnishes a gauge of the strength of the trend. For though ice skating had been practiced for centuries, until 1850, skate blades were crafted only of wood or bone. A Philadelphia businessman, Edward W Bushnell, is credited with revolutionizing the sport of skating, by being the first to manufacture a blade of steel. Strapped and clamped to the bottoms of shoes, the sharp metal blades gave skaters unprecedented speed and control.
The excitement was considerable as the innovation took hold. The Quakers of Philadelphia had always carried on their hereditary skating traditions, but steel skates led to many novelties. By the time lithographer James Fuller Queen captured this scene, many men and boys had paid up for the new skates, which were very expensive at $30 a pair. Most of the ladies and townspeople pictured are spectators only, standing still as bold skaters thread their way through the crowd.
According to John Frederick Lewis, author of Skating and the Philadelphia Skating Club (1895), a Miss Van Dyke, daughter of James C Van Dyke, US attorney for Philadelphia, was the first woman in Philadelphia to appear on skates; she “rapidly became skillful and expert” in 1854. Other ladies followed her lead, making skating fashionable, once concerns about safety and possible harassment from ruffians had been cleared away.
Image: from this source.
Click on the image for a much larger view.
This is the third in an occasional series on ice-skating. Click here to go to the first post.
In the 1850s, a rage for dancing and ice-skating swept America. Both the ball room and the surface of an icy pond offered antebellum northerners a way to escape the stiff conventionality of everyday society and discover different ways of moving and being.
This beautiful old print, a 1859 view of skaters on Jamaica Pond outside Boston, captures this well. Look closely and you may see a lady with a hockey stick.
The hazards of the ice justified the suspension of some proprieties. Top hats flew as gentlemen lost their dignity. Beneath the ladies’ long, voluminous skirts, their calves and ankles were plainly showing. Shocking!
While some women in the picture are wearing the floor-length skirts typical of the time, others are wearing shorter skating skirts which were more novel, freer and more daring.
Image: from this source. Click to enlarge.
This is the first in an occasional series on ice skating. Click forward to see the others.
We saw this beautiful watercolor in an antique store and were immediately drawn to its vibrant color and technique. Bob liked it because it was a ‘happy’ picture. Its subject, the lush backyard of a suburban home in summer, was familiar. The back yard turns out to have been on Chicago’s North Shore—perhaps in Lake Forest or Highland Park, where the water-colorist, Frederick William Boulton, lived for several decades.
Boulton (1904-1969) was born in Mishawaka, Indiana, the son of a Lutheran minister. He came to Chicago to study at the Art Institute and the American Academy of Art, completing his studies in Paris at the esteemed Académie Julian. Returning to Chicago, he embarked in 1923 on a career as a commercial artist with J Walter Thompson, the ad agency.
Boulton was successful, becoming an art director and vice president at JWT, while continuing to paint in his spare time. He founded the Art Directors’ Club of Chicago and was honored as art director of the year by the National Society of Art Directors in 1955. According to the Highland Park Public Library, which owns one of his paintings, he lived in the Braeside area of Highland Park from 1938 until the late 1950s.
‘Summertime 1944′ has a signed inscription—’As George remembers it. And fondly dedicated to him’— that adds interest and charm to what we see. The house and garden, if lifeless, are perfect. The grass is manicured, the landscape and patio glowing with order and beauty. Whether painted in the summer of 1944 or later, this elegant depiction of a place ‘George’ knew well may well have been intended to make him smile or laugh.
Does ‘Summertime 1944’ faithfully represent a place and a moment, or is it an idealized souvenir of a past that never was, or was no longer, as tranquil and perfect as memory deemed? Whatever the case, its paean to the joys of home still sings.