BOSTON, MA.- The Boston Athenæum celebrates its important collection of portraits—paintings, sculpture, engravings, and photographs--during “Portrait Week,” with lectures given by the Athenæum’s curators, focusing on some of the institution’s treasures in this genre. These lectures are free and open to the public.
The very first painting acquired by the Boston Athenæum’s collection was a portrait: a small but fascinating image of Kamehameha (c. 1758-1819), king of the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands. The Print Room’s “Portrait File” occupies 102 running feet of shelving and contains about 30,000 likenesses. The Boston Athenæum has also organized and hosted a number of exhibitions on the subject of portraiture, including the current Vanderwarker 's Pantheon: Minds and Matter in Boston, which features portraits of civic-minded Bostonians.
PORTRAIT WEEK LECTURES
Front and Center: Portraits from the Collection of the Boston Athenæum
David B. Dearinger
April 21, noon
This illustrated lecture will survey the history of portraiture and its role in the Boston Athenæum’s collection of paintings and sculpture. Focus will be given to a particularly interesting group of painted and sculpted portraits from the Athenæum’s collection, including Washington Allston’s (1814) and Charles Robert Leslie’s (1818) copies of Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of the great history painter Benjamin West; Chester Harding’s portrait of politician and patriot Daniel Webster (1828 and 1849-51); Horatio Greenough’s bust of legendary Boston beauty Emily Marshall Otis (1837-43); and Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s marble relief of Massachusetts Governor Roger Wolcott (1901-03). This lecture will reveal that, besides being artistic masterworks, each of these images has a fascinating back story related to its subject, creator, or provenance.
Dr. David B. Dearinger, Susan Morse Hilles Curator of Paintings and Sculpture and Head of the Art Department at the Boston Athenæum, holds a Ph.D. in art history and is a specialist in 19th century American art. He has published and lectured widely in the field and has curated exhibitions in New York, Boston, and elsewhere.
Historical Photographs of Children and Families: Selections from the Collection of the Boston Athenæum
Sally Pierce
April 25, 11 a.m.
Sally Pierce will present an illustrated lecture about the images from the Athenæum’s collection of prints and photographs and currently on exhibition on the Athenæum’s first floor. These daguerreotypes, cartes de visite, tintypes, and other vintage examples of photographic portraiture will be on view throughout the month of April.
Sally Pierce is Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Boston Athenæum. For 33 years she has worked with the Athenæum’s distinguished collection of 19th-century lithographs and photographs. The interpretation and exhibition of this collection has resulted in numerous publications including: Boston Lithography, 1825–1880 (with Catharina Slautterback), Early American Lithography: Images to 1830 (with Catharina Slautterback and Georgia Brady Barnhill), and Whipple and Black, Commercial Photographers in Boston.
