NEW YORK, NY.- The Winter Show announced the 2019 loan exhibition Collecting Nantucket, Connecting the World, celebrating 125 years of collecting by the Nantucket Historical Association (NHA). The Winter Show’s annual loan exhibition offers visitors a focused look at exceptional collections of art, antiques, and design from leading historic institutions, reflecting the quality, range, and expertise of the fair’s exhibitors.
Collecting Nantucket, Connecting the World explores Nantucket’s extraordinary history through the Association’s renowned collection of paintings, craft, and folk art. For more than 150 years, the island of Nantucket, located off the coast of Cape Cod, has been well known for its whaling heritage, New England seaport atmosphere, and as a famous summer holiday destination. NHA’s Gosnell Executive Director James Russell adds, “Nantucket holds a special place in the minds of many. There is a yearning to reach this spit of land 30 miles out to sea that was a strategic crossroads in the 18th and 19th centuries. Our collection has been carefully shaped for 125 years, and the items chosen for the loan exhibition have much to teach our generation as we admire the global accomplishments, entrepreneurial genius, and artistic skill of Nantucket islanders from the colonial period and the early republic through the present.”
Nantucket’s diverse people, from Native Wampanoag sailors and English settlers to African American businessmen and colorful sea captains, find pride of place in a selection of portraits by such artists as Gilbert Stuart, Eastman Johnson, Elizabeth R. Coffin, Spoilum, and James Hathaway. Additional highlights include spectacular examples of sailors’ scrimshaw, journals from captain’s wives, and art inspired by the whale hunt and sea journeys to the far side of the world.
The Association will also display the only surviving relics from the 1820 tragedy of the whaleship Essex, whose destruction by an angry whale inspired key aspects of Moby-Dick.
Helen Allen, Executive Director of The Winter Show adds, “We are honored to welcome the Nantucket Historical Association as The Winter Show’s 2019 lending institution and to showcase their extraordinary collection. The loan exhibition offers the fair’s collectors and visitors an opportunity to appreciate and be inspired by the rich history, depth, and scholarship of NHA’s collection.”
A Selection of Highlights from The Winter Show 2019 Loan Exhibition From the Nantucket Historical Association:
Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin, ca. 1810
Gilbert Stuart (1755–1828)
Oil on scored panel; 33 x 26 1/2 in.
Nantucket Historical Association Collection, gift of the Friends of the Nantucket Historical Association in memory of Tucker Gosnell with partial gift of Catherine C. Lastavica, M.D. (2005.4.1)
Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin (1759–1839) was a proud descendant of one of the first English families on Nantucket. Born in Boston to a family that remain loyal at the time of the Revolution, he joined the Royal Navy in 1773. A distinguished career allowed him to advance through the ranks and amass a considerable personal fortune. Looking to create legacies with his money, he visited Nantucket in September 1826. At the suggestion of Samuel H. Jenks, local publisher and school advocate, Coffin purchased a building and left an endowment to found a Lancastrian-style school, open free to all children descended from Tristram Coffin—a qualification that applied to a majority of the young people on the island at the time.
The Window Toward the Sea (Phebe Folger Pitman), 1886
Elizabeth Rebecca Coffin (1851–1930)
Oil on canvas; 25 1/8 x 30 1/4 in.
Nantucket Historical Association Collection, gift of the artist (1902.2.1)
Elizabeth Rebecca Coffin is the most important female artist associated with Nantucket. Many of her works depict Nantucket scenes, often approaching the island and its people from a nostalgic point of view. In this portrayal of octogenarian Phebe Folger Pitman (1801–93) knitting by the window of her ’Sconset kitchen, the rustic details of the furniture and household goods combine with the contemplative aspect of the sitter to conjure up an image of quiet life in a rural village—the very image of quaint Nantucket that was a major selling point of the island as a summer destination in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Coffin exhibited this painting at the National Academy of Design in 1887.
Deed to Coatue, 1665/1668/1677
Ink and wax on vellum; 7 9/16 x 6 in.
Nantucket Historical Association Collection, gift of Eunice S. Barney Swain, 1916 (Ms. 17 vol. 1)
The first English people arrived on Nantucket in 1659. They adopted the native Wampanoag people’s fish and shellfish foodways, expanded corn growing, and introduced sheep-herding and cattle-grazing to the island in hopes of developing trade. As their community grew, the English took control of ever greater portions of the island from the native inhabitants, negotiating purchases and gifts and securing the right to graze their animals across the entire island. In this early deed, Wanackmamack and Nickanoose, sachems of the two largest Wampanoag settlements on the island, gave the land on the north side of Nantucket harbor to Edward Starbuck, who soon after transferred it to the company of English purchasers of the island. One of the witnesses is “Asasummoo or John Gibbs,” a native man who became the island’s first native Christian minister.
Captain Absalom F. Boston, ca. 1835
Unknown Prior-Hamblin School artist
Oil on board; 14 1/2 x 10 5/8 in.
Nantucket Historical Association Collection, gift of Sampson D. Pompey (1906.56.1)
Captain Absalom F. Boston (1785–1855) was a leading figure in Nantucket’s African American community in the first half of the nineteenth century. He was a third-generation islander, and he and his family figured in a number of important milestones of local racial equality. An uncle, Prince Boston, was involved in the 1773 legal case that set in motion the end of slavery on Nantucket. When his daughter, Phebe Ann, was denied admission to Nantucket High School, Boston began litigation that spurred the desegregation of local schools in 1846. Boston himself commanded the island’s first all-black whaling crew when he took the Industry out to the Cape Verde Islands in 1822. This voyage, although not a financial success, built on his experience on many previous whaling voyages, including those of the Lydia (1808–09), Thomas (1809–11), and Independence (1817–19). He found greater success on land, where he engaged in real-estate trading and innkeeping.
Sampson Dyer, 1802
Spoilum (active ca. 1785–1810)
Oil on canvas; 23 x 18 in.
Nantucket Historical Association Collection, gift of the Friends of the Nantucket Historical Association (2013.2.1)
Sampson Dyer (1773–1843) was born in Newport, Rhode Island, of mixed African and Wampanoag heritage. He and his wife settled on Nantucket in the 1790s in the island’s small but thriving community of free black sailors and tradespeople.
For a brief period after the American Revolution and lasting until the War of 1812, Nantucket ship owners engaged in the China Trade, often gathering seal pelts on the voyage out to trade for porcelain, tea, silks, and other goods at Canton (now Guangzhou). Dyer is believed to have signed aboard the ship Active as steward for a trading voyage to China in the 1790s. From 1802 to 1805, he was aboard the Lady Adams of Nantucket on a voyage that hunted seals in the Juan Fernandez Islands off Chile before continuing to Canton. It is on one of these voyages that Dyer commissioned his portrait from the Chinese artist Spoilum, an artist who specialized in European-style paintings in oil of sea captains and both Chinese and Western merchants.
Dyer made a voyage to South Africa in 1806, returning to Nantucket in 1810 to discover his wife had been unfaithful. Abandoning her to return to South Africa, he started a new life, receiving British citizenship in 1812 and remarrying in 1813. Sealing, trading, and land-owning brought him wealth and respect. “Samson Dyer is a most extraordinary man of uncommon industry, honesty, and sobriety,” a leading Capetonian wrote of him. Dyer died in Cape Town in 1843, and Dyer Island near the Cape of Good Hope is named in his honor.
