The 140 Year Old Man

The Portrait of Yarrow Mamout (Muhammad Yaro) is an oil painting on canvas by Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) circa 1819.

I have been to the Philadelphia Museum of Art so many times I cannot recall, but every time I go, I find something new. During our Museum Practicum class trip last week, I heard the story of the Portrait of Yarrow Mamout, a painting by Charles Willson Peale.  The portrait is important because it is one of the first paintings by an American of a man of African descent and of a Muslim.  I spent the classes free time trying to find the portrait before the museum closed.

The portrait had a long journey prior to being acquired by the PMA.  Peale heard of a man who was supposedly over 140 years old and painted Yarrow Mamout while on a trip to Washington, DC.  It hung in Peale’s Philadelphia Museum on the upper floors of Independence Hall.  The painting was moved several times after the artist’s death and sold in 1854.  Unfortunately, in the confusion the painting was mislabeled and sold at auction as Washington’s Servant. The buyer, Charles S. Ogden later donated the portrait to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 1892.  In 1947, Peale’s descendent Charles Coleman Sellers correctly identified the painting.  The PMA deaccessioned several works from its own collection of American Art in order to purchase the portrait from the Atwater Kent and prevent it from leaving the city of Philadelphia in October, 2011.

The Portrait of Yarrow Mamout is now on display in Gallery 124 on the first floor of the PMA between a self-portrait of its creator, Charles Willson Peale, and Portrait of Anne Willing Bingham by Gilbert Stuart. I expected it to take center stage in the gallery, but instead it is hung near the corner on the same level as the self-portrait. (In my opinion, the presentation of the portraits in this way shows equality between the two men, artist and subject.)

Students of art, history, and museum studies can learn from the portrait. Peale is an important American artist, father of several significant artists, and founder of America’s first museum.  I had seen works by Peale before, but this was the first of his works I had seen after starting the Museum Education Program at the University of the Arts.  Two weeks prior to the Museum Practicum trip, we discussed Peale in our Museology class. This discussion helped inform my viewing of Yarrow Mamout.  (Students should also discuss whether the portrait would still be as significant if it was still viewed as a painting of George Washington’s slave.)

The Museum Education Department at the PMA developed an educational poster for teachers.  As a former Six Grade Social Studies Teacher in New Jersey, I would want to develop lesson plans for teachers covering colonization and the American Revolutionary periods that would cross curriculums with art (studying Peale’s work), Language Arts (reading the article about the PMA’s acquisition of the work) and possibly even science (making and using old paint) prior to taking my students on a trip to the PMA. 

Information  and photos taken from the Philadelphia Museum of Art website.

http://www.philamuseum.org/press/releases/2011/893.html
Accessed September 23, 2012

http://www.philamuseum.org/acquisitions/
Accessed September 25, 2012

 

 

The Weeping Girl

The Weeping Chorus, 2012, engraved and painted glass, by Judith Schaechter

 

In a small cellblock, # 14 of ESP, there is a small window featuring a small girl in a blue dress with yellow shoes.  She has tears streaming down one side of her face. The window is one of three (there is also a mother and a sister pictured in other windows) in the Weeping Chorus, a stained glass installation by Judith Schaechter on display at the museum for the 2012 season.  The window is made of two layers of glass with paint that has been fired on. The bluish tones from the sun shining through the glass illuminate the room, contributing the eerie, tragic and claustrophobic feeling I experienced in the decaying cell in which the glass is displayed.  The look on the girl’s face expressed not only pain, fear, and sadness on losing her father or brother to the prison system, but also on the difficult life she is now also destined to have.

This a striking image for visitors to ESP, who see the now stabilized high walled ruin as just another haunted house and would not be interested in art installations. Being locked up in Eastern State Penitentiary did not just affect the inmates within its walls, Schaechter’s Weeping Chorus reminds visitors of the fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, sons, and daughters that suffered when a man or woman was imprisoned there. 

 

ESP will be starting official school tours this season and in my opinion, this window should be included on any tour along with the sculpture Elsie at Five Years Old, by Susan Hagen.  It is important for students visiting the museum to be able to make real life connections.  Teachers may be interested in using the stained glass and sculpture as prompts to engage students in a discussion about how they or how they might feel about living or knowing someone living in a corrections facility.  They may ask students to compare the difference between the girl depicted in the window, whose relative has been sentenced there to “Elsie” who actually lives there because she is the warden’s daughter.

My Grandmother's Piano

My Grandmother’s Piano

I have amassed quite a collection of antiques over the years.  Some were purchases at yard sales and others taken out of the neighbor’s garbage.  Some were bought at expensive antique stores, while some were picked at the Duxbury Massachusetts Transfer Station, also referred to as “The Treasure Chest” (Duxbury is across the bay from Plymouth and sits on the originally land granted to Miles Standish).  Most of my pieces, however, were inherited from grandparents and other relatives.  Each of these items has a higher emotional value than what they are worth on “Antiques Roadshow”.  Just looking around my room there is: a collection of maroon “leather bound” novels, an elaborate vanity my aunt gave me when she moved to Florida (the matching armoire is in the living room because it is too heavy and too tall to carry up the stairs), my grandmother’s bedroom furniture I inherited when she died. The room would be a beautiful if I could ever keep it clean. 

Downstairs, on the other side of the living room, behind an oversized couch is my favorite piece of furniture.  There sits my great grandmother’s John Wanamaker piano. It belonged to my great-grandmother, Joann Woodward (of the Quaker Woodwards of Moorestown).  She married William Rhawn, descendant of the banker of the same name (as in Rhawn Street and the Rhawn mansion, Knowlton, in Philadelphia). My grandmother, Sally, and her siblings took lessons on it as a child.  My own mother and aunts played the piano as children.

 No one in my house knows how to play it.  I still wish I had asked my grandmother for piano lessons. It is currently being used to display picture frames.  Usually, when visitors walk in the house, they ask about the photos and don’t notice a piano.  The woman in running shorts is my grandmother.  She died of cancer.  The piano belonged to her.  The other photos are of my cousins, my cousin’s children, my brother, and I. After my grandmother died and my grandfather moved, he gave the piano to my cousin for her small children. It sat in her dining room. When she moved, she put it out for trash.  I couldn’t let her throw it away; it was like putting part of my childhood out on the curb.  So, my mother and I went and moved it into our house before the trash men came. I paid two-hundred dollars to have it tuned.  Unfortunately, some of the keys still don’t work properly.  The repairmen said it would cost several thousands of dollars to have the innards of the piano replaced so it would work properly.  Someday, when I can afford it, I would like to have the piano restored.  I may never learn to play it, but I want my children to enjoy banging on the keys, as I did as a small child visiting my grandparents’ home.