Illuminating the Charles: Collecting Manuscripts in Boston

In the Gilded Age, transatlantic travel opened Bostonian eyes to the Old World; the wealth of the New World and its cultural ambitions brought treasures to Boston in unprecedented numbers. Illuminated manuscripts and incunables are only a part of the larger influx of medieval and Renaissance art that crossed the Atlantic from the late 1800s entering, in most cases, first into American private collections and then later into cultural institutions. 1 Illuminated manuscripts and books, leaves, and cuttings reached these shores in particularly large numbers due to their relative portability in comparison to the panel paintings, stone sculpture, stained glass, and metalwork that also attracted considerable attention. As a prelude to the almost 250 local book treasures illuminated in this volume, this essay explores the history of manuscript collecting in Boston and introduces some of the principal contributors to the development of the rich holdings in and around the city.

Born in England, William Gibbons Medlicott (1816-83) “swam to America” (according to family lore), having been shipwrecked off Rockaway Beach, Long Island. A classic American rags-to-riches story, he rose from humble roots to find success as a wool manufacturer, and settled in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. The income from Medlicott’s business allowed him to pursue his passion for book collecting; he assembled an impressive library said to have numbered 20,000 volumes including many imports from Europe. A reverse in Medlicott's finances, however, forced him to sell almost a third of his collection in 1878. Eschewing a book auction, he compiled a 380-page catalogue with the assistance of Frederic Beecher Perkins (1838-99), bibliographer and “special cataloguer” at the Boston Public Library, which he sent to academics and librarians at leading universities and civic institutions on the East and West Coasts. Boston-area buyers included Harvard, Wellesley College, and the Boston Public Library. Yale, Princeton, and the San Francisco Public Library were also important purchasers. The Medlicott sale was a turning point in Americas educational history, providing an unprecedented opportunity for institutions of learning to supplement and fill gaps in their nascent research libraries. Medlicott's sale included seventy-eight medieval and Renaissance manuscripts and twenty-three incunables, two of which are in the present exhibition: an Italian Renaissance gradual now at Wellesley College (cat. no. 224, see opposite) and a fifteenth-century German prayer book illustrated with two woodcuts now at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (cat. no. 70).

Other individuals in the Boston area built the foundation of their libraries with souvenirs of their travels abroad. One of the first was Edward Everett (1794-1865), Eliot Professor of Greek Literature at Harvard. In 1819, after a trip to Constantinople, he presented one Latin and six Greek manuscripts to the Harvard Library. The next major gift of early books and manuscripts to Harvard was the bequest of the Hon. Charles Sumner (1811-74). On May 22, 1856, in the United States Congress, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, an abolitionist, was attacked with a walking cane on the floor of the Senate by Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina in retaliation for a speech given by Sumner two days earlier in which he fiercely attacked slaveholders, including a relative of Brooks. This incident is recognized as a major turning point in American history leading up to the Civil War. Sumner was badly injured and spent time recuperating in Europe in 1857 and 1858. It was during this period of convalescence that he probably acquired many of the books and manuscripts that he left to Harvard. Of the twenty-three manuscripts in his bequest two (cat. nos. 2 and 110) are in this exhibition.

Harvard College (founded in 1636) purchased its first medieval manuscripts in 1896; seven classical texts acquired from the London bookseller Bernard Quaritch (1819-99) from his Rough List 164 published that same year. All seven came from the sale of the library of the famed English bibliomane Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872) in June of that year, and it would appear that after the Phillipps sale Harvard took advantage of a comparative flood (and, consequently, low prices) of such material on the market. It also seems that the purchasers were anxious about these acquisitions. Each of these manuscripts has pasted into it a paper note stating: “This manuscript is bought with the concurrence of the Classical Department and it maybe allowed to go into the hands of any instructor in that department for purposes of investigation or instruction in the classroom.” The note is signed by the college’s librarian, Justin Winsor (1831-17), with a rubber stamp. The library thus made a clear and firm statement that it was not purchasing treasures or works of art, but texts for purposes of instruction and research in basic subjects at the core of its mission to educate. In 1899, Harvard acquired the library of Paul Edward Didier, comte de Riant (1836-88), a collection relating to the Crusades that in addition to other materials included fifty-six medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. These are mainly textual manuscripts and one (cat. no. 52) is in this exhibition.

A reflection of and a stimulus to this acquisition activity may have been the public exhibitions of manuscripts and rare books, including at the Boston Public Library in 1897 and 1898, and at Allston Hall in 1899. By the 1930s, French bibliographer Seymour de Ricci (1881-1942) reported in his survey of manuscripts in the Boston-area that there were twenty private collectors and nineteen institutional repositories, for a total of 1,177 volumes in the city and environs. When and how did Bostonians acquire so many manuscripts, and where are they now? Some of the private collections catalogued by de Ricci are now at the Houghton Library or the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Others were sold at auction or are untraced.

One of the early Boston collections not in de Ricci is that of Thomas F. Richardson. As early as February and March 1890, he loaned two manuscripts and a number of leaves and cuttings to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Richardson’s collection included eighteen codices and more than 230 leaves and cuttings. Unfortunately for Boston, his widow Ellen P. Richardson sold the collection in 1919 to John Frederick Lewis (1860-1932) of Philadelphia and as a result this collection is now in the Free Library of Philadelphia, the gift of Lewis’s widow, Anne Baker Lewis, in 1936. The Houghton recently acquired one of Thomas Richardson’s illuminated leaves (MS Lat 457) as a reminder of an important collection that began in Boston, but did not stay there.

One of the purchasers at the above mentioned sale of William G. Medlicott’s library was Henry Fowle Durant (1822- 81), who, with his wife Pauline, founded the prestigious women’s college, Wellesley, in 1870. He donated 8,000 of his own books to the library that he continued to augment. In 1880, he purchased from Medlicott an imposing liturgical manuscript, now known as the Durant Gradual (cat. no. 224). Another of the buyers of Medlicott’s rare books was Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908), Harvard’s first professor of art history and the “Father of Art History in America.” In 1871, Norton wrote to his friend John Ruskin (1819-1900): “For largeness of design within the limits of the State, for method of policy, for gravity of purpose, for splendor in life, for the union of beauty with strength, elegance with force, luxury with self control, Venice and the Venetians of old were never matched in history.” Norton’s reverence for the Republic of Venice and friendship with the influential English art critic and author of The Stones of Venice, led him to form a collection of Venetian manuscripts between the 1870s and 1900. The Harvard professor’s collection included ducal commissions purchased in the lagoon city with the aid of a circle of British expatriates (cat. nos. 206-7), and a confraternity statute book acquired from Ruskin’s estate following the Englishman’s death (cat. no. 37). Norton’s fascination with Venice was common among the upper echelons of Boston society. Brahmins admired the Venetian combination of republican government, patrician families, and maritime heritage, believing it to closely resemble their own society. Northern European manuscripts formerly in Ruskin’s hands also entered Norton’s library. Ruskin presented his American friend with a breviary (now recognized as Flemish) on January 27, 1873, writing of the gift (cat. no. 44): “...I also send you, wanting it out of my way, an old English MS. breviary of late 14th century—possibly you may like to refer to such a thing sometimes—it seems very full and illustrative in its way—but I’ve never made use of it, and now never shall.”

In 1903, Norton invited the art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924) to his home to see his collection of Venetian manuscripts and learn about “their respective value & rarity,” as he had decided to sell the book treasures. Recognizing “their value as a collection to be more than that which they would have separately” for their mutual illustration of one another “both historically and artistically,” he offered it en bloc to Gardner for $2,500, as he believed that there was not “another purchaser in the United States...who would care enough for them to give that sum for them.” Norton’s decision to sell to Gardner was also inspired by her recently opened museum, an ode to Venetian art and architecture, which Norton praised as a “consummate... achievement... in which a poetic conception has found poetic expression,” as well as her plans to bequeath her collection to the city of Boston. Gardner was one of the many friends and students to whom Norton sold manuscripts and rare books toward the end of his life, as he was anxious about the financial security of his family. Harvard also acquired many books from Norton’s library in 1905 through donations from his students, colleagues, and friends.

William King Richardson (1859-1951) was a member of the Harvard College class of 1880. Just two years later he earned a double first at Balliol College, Oxford University (purportedly the first American to obtain this distinction at Oxford). His library was begun at the Lord Amherst of Hackney sale in 1908. For more than forty years, Richardson had the opportunity and the means to collect printed books and manuscripts of distinction. He maintained a considerable variety of scholarly interests throughout his life; his library was similarly wide-ranging. One of its particular strengths was illuminated manuscripts and early printed books; he owned forty-nine of the former. Richardson’s bequest of his book collection to Harvard College Library constituted one of its most important accessions. On its receipt in 1951, William A. Jackson (1905-64), the first librarian of Houghton Library, wrote that “from the beginning Richardson dealt with able and knowledgeable booksellers, whose aid in forming the collection is apparent on every shelf; for many of the books still contain the notes or letters of Martini, Tregaskis, Belin, Goldschmidt, Quaritch, Olschki, Maggs, and Robinson. At most of the great sales of the past forty years he obtained, either directly or soon after, some few treasures. Of these, the Hoe, Huth, Britwell, Mostyn, Phillipps, Beatty, Schiff, Clumber, Mensing, Peckover, and Lothian sales maybe mentioned particularly. Many of his books, likewise, contain marks of ownership of the distinguished collectors of earlier generations.” Richardson was also the donor of four medieval manuscripts to Houghton prior to his bequest. The twenty-one Richardson manuscripts included in this exhibition testify to his discernment as a collector (see Index of Manuscripts & Printed Books in this volume).

One of Richardson’s mentors and advisors was Philip Hofer (1898-1984), a member of the Harvard College class of 1921. The founding curator of Houghton Library’s Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, which documents the development of letterforms and the arts of the book, Hofer collaborated with Houghton’s first librarian Jackson, who was known as “The Grand Acquisitor.” He used both personal and endowed funds to assemble the greatest collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in Boston, which he donated to the Houghton Library during his lifetime and as a bequest. Hofer built equally important collections in the book arts, prints, and calligraphy. His collection, with the shelfmark Typ(ography), which is represented in this volume by eighty-two manuscripts and printed books, continues to grow due to the generosity of friends who have endowed acquisition funds in his honor.

In 1901, Wellesley College received a 600-volume “teaching library” of Italian literature from the New York publisher and bibliophile George Arthur Plimpton (1855-1936) in memory of his wife Frances Taylor Pearsons Plimpton (class of 1884). The collection included manuscripts and printed editions of the works of the “Three Crowns” of Italian literature, Petrarch (cat. no. 215), Dante, and Boccaccio, as well as later Italian Renaissance authors. Frances started collecting rare books in Italy during the 1880s, and, after her marriage, shared this pursuit with her husband until her premature death in 1900. A widower for seventeen years, George added to Frances’s memorial collection at Wellesley even after he remarried. He was advised by the colleges professor of Italian, Margaret Hastings Jackson (d. 1939), who became the first curator of the Plimpton Collection. Mr. Plimpton bequeathed his own collection of rare books on the history of education to Columbia University (cat. no. 145). Frances and George’s son, the lawyer Francis T. P. Plimpton (1900-83), was also a bibliophile and friend of Philip Hofer (cat. no. 200).

The story behind the small but varied collection of manuscripts at Tufts University (founded in 1852) has recently come to light. It is largely indebted to a mysterious alumnus from the class of 1928, Walter F. Welchjr. (c. 1906-after 1967). Welch began donating books and fragments of manuscripts in 1952, mailing them to Medford from his home in Santa Monica (cat. nos. 126,138, and 205). His earliest known letter to Tufts regarding the collection, dated January 12, 1953, simply states: “It is a very great pleasure for me to be able to do this and I hope to send more in the future.” Four years later, Tufts Weekly published a front-page feature on highlights from Welch’s collection, then on display in the Eaton Memorial Library thanks to the librarian Joseph S. Komidar (1916-2001). Welch was intent on forming a teaching collection for Tufts on the history of writing from “cave painting to comic strips” in the hopes that its students would be more knowledgeable about the subject than their peers. Preferring a long-distance relationship with his alma mater, Welch “the unobtrusive benefactor” ignored invitations to attend receptions in his honor held by the college. His last letter in the Tuft’s gifts correspondence is dated December 3, 1967.

The significant development of the manuscript collection at the Boston Public Library (founded in 1852) maybe the only one in the Boston area primarily spurred by the sale of an important European collection. At the urging and through the agency of Englishman Sydney Cockerell (1867-1962), later to become the director of Cambridge University’s Fitzwilliam Museum, the Boston Public Library acquired twenty-one medieval and Renaissance manuscripts injune 1901 at one of the last sales of the Earl of Ashburnham’s library (cat. no. 178). Through Cockerell the library acquired a wide range of materials and spent one-sixth of its trust fund acquisition budget for the year, a bold move by an unlikely Anglo-American partnership considering the library’s other obligations and Cockerell’s untested abilities as an intermediary. Other major buyers at this sale included the British Museum, the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris, and the American private collectors J. Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) and Henry Walters (1838-1941), whose collections later became institutional libraries.

At the same Ashburnham sale Isabella Stewart Gardner acquired a manuscript of Dante’s Divine Comedy on the recommendation of Charles Eliot Norton (cat. no. 214). This manuscript and others at the museum founded by Gardner in 1903 have attracted sporadic scholarly attention over the years, yet until recently had not been the subject of systematic research since they were catalogued by de Ricci in the 1930s. 31 Gardner had begun collecting rare books in the 1880s, almost a decade before she came into the large inheritance that launched her into a new level of art purchases and patronage for which she became famous. One could say that books were Gardner’s gateway to the collecting of art, if it were not for the fact that she remained passionate about them and continued to acquire books right up until her death in 1924. At the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on Boston’s Back Bay Fens (called Fenway Court during her lifetime) hang four portraits of its legendary founder. The three by John Singer Sargent, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and Anders Zorn will spring to mind, but the fourth will have escaped the notice of many. 32 It lives in a corner of the second-floor Short Gallery and shows her reading a book. 33 Its placement there by Gardner is a reminder to visitors that she was a bibliophile, as well as an art lover. This facet of her collecting has been largely overlooked, even though her library is shelved in cabinets in plain sight throughout the building. The museum’s book collection was known as the Library while Gardner lived, and it comprised then and now approximately 2,500 volumes. Like the art collection, they are located in the galleries as Gardner originally arranged them, according to the famous stipulation of her will bequeathing the museum to Boston “for the education and enjoyment of the public forever.” 34 Gardner dictated that should any of the artworks or books be moved from their place, the entire collection would be auctioned and the proceeds donated to Harvard. Gardner distributed her books around the museum according to a thematic and hierarchical arrangement that corresponds to the installation of her artworks. Masterpieces of medieval and Renaissance painting and sculpture occupy the grander galleries on the museum’s two upper levels, and among these she placed her forty-two illuminated manuscripts, eleven incunables, and other prized books. They mainly reside in the “Dante Case” along with a copy of the poet’s death mask in the Long Gallery adjoining the Titian and Gothic rooms.

Much credit for the Gardner Museum’s remarkable trove is owed to the oft-mentioned Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton. Gardner audited his undergraduate course on the history of the fine arts, attended private readings of the Divine Comedy at his home, and belonged to the Dante Society, of which Norton was a founding member and later president. 35 In 1886, Norton alerted Gardner to the forthcoming sale of the library of Edward Cheney (1803-84) at Sotheby’s in London, and recommended that she purchase three early printed books: two editions of Dante’s Divine Comedy, one illustrated with woodcuts printed in Brescia in 1487, and the other, the first pocket-sized edition of the text printed by Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1502 (cat. nos. 248-49). The third book, also issued from the Aldine press, in 1499, was a copy of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, an antiquarian romance considered one of the most beautiful illustrated books ever printed (cat. no. 240). This was the beginning of a two-decade role for Norton as library advisor and purveyor of rare books to Gardner. She acknowledged their new biblio- philic relationship in a letter to him following the Cheney sale: “Owing to your kindness, I am the happy and proud possessor of several valuable books....Books, I fear are a most fascinating and dangerous pursuit, but one full of pleasure, and I owe it entirely to you, if I have made a good beginning.” 36 Norton introduced Gardner to the important sales of British aristocratic libraries, such as the Crawford and Ashburnham collections, which were being dispersed at a rapid rate. He advised Gardner to appoint Bernard Quaritch, London’s leading rare bookseller, to act as her library agent and to bid on her behalf at the London sales. Gardner did not only buy books recommended by Norton. Her confidence in making purchases independently and good eye are evident from her most spectacular acquisition, which she made in 1890 while searching for rare volumes on holiday in Venice. There she bought an exquisitely illuminated early sixteenth-century manuscript book of hours (cat. no. 112). Since Gardner’s death, experts have hailed it as a mature work of Jean Bourdichon (1457-1521), the eminent court-artist who for over forty years served four French kings: Louis XI, Charles VIII, Louis XII, and Francis I. During Gardner’s lifetime Bour- dichon’s artistic persona represented a recent discovery, and his oeuvre remained ill-defined, so her acquisition of the prayer book in 1890 also demonstrates remarkable prescience. Gardner also turned down book treasures that did not suit her tastes or pocket. Around 1899, she was contacted by the British archaeologist John Marshall (1862-1928), who offered her the chance to acquire the famed Golden Gospels of Lord Ashburnham for the sum of £10,000, acknowledging that it was “an enormous price certainly for a binding, but one which would not strike you as exaggerated if you saw the book. It must be one of the finest pieces of decoration of Charlemagne's date.” 37 Evidently she rejected the late eighth-century book with a spectacular treasure binding, now known as the Lindau Gospels, purchased byj. Pierpont Morgan in 1901. At Morgans library in New York, the book boasts the prestigious shelfmark M.l. 38.

Isabella Stewart Gardner’s library reflects her deep interest in European royal history. She was particularly fascinated by the Stuarts, from whom she claimed descent through her paternal line. The Stuart ancestor who intrigued Gardner the most was Mary, Queen of Scots (1542-87). Gardner dedicated a case in the Long Gallery to Mary, where she displayed relics of the queen, who was considered a martyr by some Catholics in the nineteenth century. Chief among them was Mary’s book of hours printed on vellum, which is inscribed by the queen’s mother-in-law Catherine de’ Medici (1519-89), husband Frangois II (1544-60), a maternal uncle, probably her favorite Charles de Guise, cardinal of Lorraine (1524-74), and a cousin Louis de Lorraine (1555-88) (cat. no. 245). Gardner paid the large sum of £225 to secure the potent symbol of Mary’s steadfast Catholic faith when the book was sold in the 1887 auction of the Bibliotheca Lindesiana, the famous library of the earls of Crawford. Proud of her prestigious book possessions and the knowledge that they would remain at her museum in perpetuity, Gardner signed some volumes bearing inscriptions of earlier owner’s names with the words “Mine now” (cat. no. 37).

Gardner’s library was widely known and admired in Boston, even before she opened her museum in 1903. Highlights from her collection were exhibited to the public on at least three occasions, including at the Boston Public Library and Allston Hall in the late 1890s (cat. nos. 235, 239-41, 244-47, 249). 39 She also published two catalogues of books from her library in 1906 and 1922. 40 Issued in large print runs and distributed widely to fellow book lovers, art collectors, and libraries, the catalogues publicized her impressive collection and status as a bona fide bibliophile. Gardner wrote the first catalogue herself, despite the strong recommendation of its publisher, Daniel Berkeley Updike (1860-1941), that she hire an editor. Updike was the most accomplished Arts and Crafts printer in America, and his Merrymount Press in Boston specialized in producing attractive, deluxe private press publications for wealthy bibliophiles and limited-edition clubs. Mindful of his reputation as a scholar-printer, Updike refused to allow his imprint to appear in Gardner’s book because there were so many errors in the text. Perhaps this is why Gardner wrote rather defensively to her art advisor Bernard Berenson (1865-1959) a year after its publication: “It is my choice of books, choice for many reasons—some in sentiment—others for merit.” 41 The 1922 catalogue was dedicated to manuscripts and fine bindings, and compiled with the assistance of Morris Carter (1877-1965), a professional librarian who had worked at Princeton University Library and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Gardner hired Carter in 1919 to assist her in preparations of the catalogue. Just prior to starting his new position, Carter wrote to Updike: “I have a presentiment that, after June 1st, when I begin to be an employee of Mrs. Gardner, I shall never again have an hour at my disposal, but if she should undertake the publication of catalogues, I might sometimes be sent to you on an errand.” 42 Six months after Carter joined the museum, Gardner suffered a debilitating stroke so Carter became her private secretary (or “write-hand man” as she called him) as well as librarian. Together they completed the catalogue of Gardner’s rare books in 1922, just two years before her death after which Carter, a librarian not an art historian, became the first director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

This essay on the topic of collecting manuscripts in Boston is introductory in both senses of the word; it cannot pretend to be an exhaustive “de Ricci-esque” survey, but its purpose is to pique interest and curiosity in others to research the foundations of the city’s rare bookholdings. Two notable omissions in this essay are the Boston Athenaeum and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. One might marvel that there are just two manuscripts from the Boston Athenaeum in this exhibition (cat. nos. 130 and 140). Founded in 1807, the Athenaeum is one of the oldest and most distinguished independent libraries in Boston and the United States. Its origins date, however, to an era in American history when books were acquired to be read, not for their format or rarity. Consequently, the Athenaeum was set up as a non-circulating reference library and reading room filled with encyclopedias, newspapers, and atlases to serve the needs of gentlemen scholars and Brahmin businessmen. Remaining true to its roots as an elegant working library, the library now residing at the wonderful address of IOV 2 Beacon Street boasts books that have become rare due to the passage of time as well as the efforts of Stanley Cushing, who joined the Athenaeum in 1971 and was appointed its first curator of rare books and manuscripts in 2002.

Of undoubted importance for the history of manuscripts at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (founded in 1870) is Denman Waldo Ross (1853-1935), Harvard professor of design and art theory from 1889 to his death. As a museum trustee, Ross helped to build the collection, and most notably the creation of an Oriental Art department. He donated both Islamic and Western manuscripts to the museum (cat. nos. 9-10). 44 Ross also helped his good friend Isabella Stewart Gardner to branch out in this new area of collecting Islamic manuscripts between 1913 and 1914. 45 Perhaps the onset of World War I put a stop to further acquisitions in this direction by Gardner.

It has been shown that Boston’s rich and diverse collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts and printed books is the result of considerable individual and institutional effort over many years. These treasures are collectively a sizable inheritance, deserving appreciation for the beauty contained within them and also for the history that has brought them to reside in this city. They reflect not only Boston’s growing cultural aspirations but also the city’s considerable achievements in illuminating its residents.