2011 Gest Fellow Matthew Reilly posts on the University of Texas Viz. blog about the anti-Quakeriana materials he encountered at Haverford this past summer. An excerpt and link to the full post follows:

Over the past summer, I spent a month as a Gest Fellow at Haverford College’s Quaker & Special Collections, where I was researching an eighteenth-century female preacher. The most entertaining and unexpected find over that month pertained to an image archive classified as “Anti-Quakeriana.” One of the more interesting aspects of Quaker history (in my opinion) is their retention of documents released by rivals and detractors. Hence the origin of the classification, “Anti-Quakeriana.” As a result of such practices, scholars and historians now have an archive rich in cultural contexts and historical negotiations that mark the transitions from a seventeenth-century “schism” to an eighteenth-century “sect.” Below, I briefly discuss a series of paintings and engravings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century female ministers.

Continue reading on Matthew’s blog at Viz.

Among the thirty-nine South Asian and Chinese sculptures that were donated to Haverford in March 2011 by Herta Grove, a friend of the college, is a white marble statue of Buddha.
There is relatively little history known about this 16″ carving, which may have come from Thailand or Burma, and the date of its creation is unknown. Several dabs of color on the marble indicate it may once have been painted. Lacking any solid data, we can focus on Buddha himself and the various ways in which he has been depicted, as well as on the style of this particular Buddha. Sakyamuni Buddha, who lived for approximately eighty years in what is today northern India and southern Nepal sometime between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE, was the most recent of a series of buddhas who have appeared in the past and will appear again in the future, but he was the Buddha for the current period. Over time, Buddhism spread to Japan and China and many countries of South and East Asia.
Buddha is generally represented seated, standing or reclining. The pose and hand-gesture, known as mudra, is meaningful and specific to a region, so, for example, the Vajra mudra where the right hand is above the left which holds the fifth finger of the right hand is popular in Japan and Korea, but rarely in India. In the marble statue under examination, the pose is known as the earth to witness mudra, the left hand crossing the torso, while the right gracefully descends toward earth, symbolizes the Buddha summoning the earth goddess, Sthavara, to bear witness to his worthiness of attaining enlightenment. Other physical aspects in this representation are elongated earlobes denoting exceptional perception, and a protuberance on the top of the head denoting superb mental acuity.
Please visit Special Collections www.haverford.edu/library/special/index.php where the collection is currently housed.

Yesterday, I came across a box of Anna Morris Shinn Maier’s personal books. They are mostly diaries from her adult life, but included in the box were a guest book, and autograph book, and two sketchbooks, as well as an assortment of “Cookery Cards.” While the sketchbooks are largely blank, they are interesting because the pages Anna did fill hold careful sketches that are simple yet charming. 
Most of the drawings are pen and ink images of scenery; mountains,  trees, and lakes. I was curious about the forest-like setting  of the sketches, which were initialed “A.M.S.,” (Anna before she married Paul D.I. Maier), and dated. I spent a little time investigating the diaries in the box, found the year, 1896, and read several of the August entries. There, Anna wrote about a trip that she took with a number of family members and friends. Thanks to Anna’s detailed diary accounts,  I now know that their weather was nice and clear, even “splendid” on the third day. For five days, the party spent their time together or in groups, walking the mountains and boating. Anna recorded that she enjoyed spending a lot of time with “Nancy,” and when the others went fishing, she preferred to sit on the shore and read or draw.
Reading these accounts of what sounds like a delightful trip makes me simultaneously remember summer trips I’ve been on in the past, and muse about the possibility of someone else skimming one of my journals in the future, looking for clues to what my life is like now.

For more information on this (or other) collections, please feel free to come in to Special Collections, or email hc-special@haverford.edu.

Today marks my completion of going through half of all the links in the finding aid for Special Collections. This means that I have read the descriptions of, and checked the links for, HALF of all the collections in Special Collections. That is a lot of collections. And I have to say, there is some really interesting material in here. For instance, in the ” Baltimore Monthly Meeting Homewood records,” there are signed letters by Abraham Lincoln! Then, there are pictures of William Lloyd Garrison, noted abolitionist and newspaper editor, in the “Friends Historical Association” collection. Add to that documents from 1 A.D. (“Dean Putnam Lockwood”), correspondence with John Updike (“John R. Hawkins”), letters from Alexander Graham Bell (“Edward Drinker Cope”), documents from William Penn (“William Penn papers”), hundreds of recordings of concerts by Haverford students, faculty and others (“John Davison papers”), and a sampling of letters by U.S. Presidents (“William Pyle Phillips collection”)! And those are just the things that immediately jumped out at me! There are definitely some major gems for the curious explorer to find here. If one is interested in people standing up for there beliefs, there are multiple mentions of a Thomas Story (1670?-1742) who was a former fencer and musician turned Quaker, a friend of William Penn, discussed Quakerism with Tsar Peter the Great,and was arrested for preaching Quaker faith in Kilkenny (the warrant for his arrest is in the “British Friends’ letters”). For those interested in the history of the library, there are the “James Phineas Magill papers” (after whom our library is named) and the “Michael S. Freeman papers” (who was a major proponent of Tri-Co library cooperation). If your fancy is more American history, I would direct you to the “John Ewer letters” which are from one merchant to another regarding the early signs of the American Revolution.

If you aren’t necessarily interested in the above topics, but you are colored intrigued, you can always check out the Finding Aid (which I would generally recommend!). I’ve been working here for a semester, and I didn’t have any idea that this was all here. This leads me to believe that most of the college doesn’t even know what awesome resources are back here. So come check it out!

If you have any questions, you could email me at kmoll@haverford.edu, or, if you want the good help, email Haverford College Special Collections at hc-special@haverford.edu.

I was pleased to receive in the mail recently a copy of Pierpaolo Polzonetti’s Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution, published in 2011 by Cambridge University Press.  The cover of this excellent book displays a copy of our striking oil painting of The Quaker meeting: woman preaching from a tub by Egbert van Heemskerck.

Given the delicate and sometimes strained relationship that Quakers have had with music—especially in the religious movement’s earliest years—few would suspect that the cover of a book about Italian opera would be graced with an image of a Quaker meeting.  Yet 18th- and 19th-century Europeans were fascinated by Pennsylvanian Quakers.  Voltaire is noted for extolling their virtues in a series of letters.  And when Benjamin Franklin went to Paris he was mistaken for being a Quaker and did little to correct the misunderstanding.  Polzonetti’s book explores issues of American identity, including the depiction of Quakers, through the receptive lens of Italian opera.

Our painting by van Heemskerck is one of several from the late 17th century by the Dutch artist living in England.  These were copied frequently, especially as engravings.  It seems depictions of Quakers were popular no matter the medium, and in this case, at least, the treatment is dramatic, even worthy of opera.

Those who notice initials after a person’s name will be impressed by ones following Theodore William Richards,  class of 1885.  After he received his B.S. from Haverford, he received a B.A. from Harvard in 1886; an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard in 1888; an Sc.D. from Yale in 1905; a Chem.D. from Clark in 1909; a Ph.D. from Prague in 1909; an Sc.D. from Harvard in 1910; an M.D. from Berlin in 1910; a D.Sc. from Cambridge in 1911; a D.Sc. from Oxford in 1911; a D.Sc. from Manchester in 1911; a Ph.D. from Christiania in 1911; an LL.D. from Pittsburgh in 1915; an LL.D. from Pennsylvania in 1920; and, oh yes, an LL.D. from Haverford in 1908.

Since his accomplishments are even longer than his string of degrees, suffice it to say that he was a chemist who received a Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1914, becoming the first American to receive that honor.  His research uncovered the atomic weights of twenty-five important elements.

Richards was extremely methodical as a scientist and extremely successful as a teacher, though his student, J. Robert Oppenheimer did not find his teaching methods brilliant and deemed him “afraid of even rudimentary mathematics.”

Richards’ father, William Trost Richards was a well-regarded artist and his mother, Anna Matlack, a Quaker. Richards himself was interested sports, music, literature, and art.  So, now we get to the illustration here depicted.

Barclay Hall on Haverford’s campus was built at the end of the 1870s, and Richards, no doubt, was living in no. 7 in January 1885, though there is no documentation in the college archives to prove this, nor to indicate who was his roommate. What we see in the accompanying watercolor drawing by Richards is a simple desk with books, a tennis racquet and art on the walls, possibly an oriental rug on the floor, no light of any kind. Richards clearly was also a talented artist.

The semester is off to a bang in Special Collections.  Last week, history of science professor Darin Hayton, brought his class on “The Scientific Revolution” to visit and introduced them to a range of primary sources and the types of questions one should ask when confronted with such a text.  Texts discussed during the visit included Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium caelestium (1543), Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (1686), and Ralph Cudworth’s The true intellectual system of the universe (1678).  In an upcoming assignment, students will be asked to select, describe and analyze a text from our collection (or Bryn Mawr’s) that falls between 1500 and 1700, roughly the dates covered in the course.  In preparing for supporting this assignment bibliographers Ann Upton and Margaret Schaus have uncovered a rich trove of scientific literature within our rare book stacks.

Students in professor of art history Carol Solomon’s course on “Art, Politics, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Europe” have been spending quality time with editions of the works of William Blake.  This week students picked illustrations from such works as The Songs of Innocence and Experience, America, a Prophecy, The Book of Urizen, Vala or The Four Zoas, and The Book of Job, and presented on the works within the political, social and cultural contexts of the period.

Next week we’re expecting a visit by professor Kaye Edwards and her class on “Quaker Social Witness.”  They will be learning about our print, manuscript, and online resources on Quakerism from librarians Diana Peterson, Ann Upton and Anne Moore.  During the semester students will have several assignments that will make use of materials from the Quaker Collection.  Three research papers will include an exploration of a specific Quaker testimony and its relationship to social action; an examination of a historical figure from the Religious Society of Friends; and an analysis of a current Quaker project toward social justice.  Additionally, students in the course will be attending parts of the upcoming conference on Quakers and Slavery, co-hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore College and Haverford College.

Walter Hinchman (1845-1920) was an artist and a Quaker.  His bio states that he was a member of the American Federation of Arts and worked in machine shops as a draftsman and surveyor; he was also the author of the book Sketches and Poems. But more to the point, he was a fine artist, and Haverford owns an album of his drawings and sketches. Not to minimize his talents, he also had a sense of humor.  Depicted here from this same album are “William M. Spackman and Walter Hinchman posing as Raphael Cherubs.”  Raphael’s well-known painting entitled “Sistine Madonna” with the two cherubs at the bottom, which was created in 1512-1513, seems to be their reference.  Serious scholars have written important works on the meaning of the painting, including  the two cherubs or putti, who are seen either as  part of the overall significance of the painting or just as marginal or decorative.  Hinchman’s entire album is available for inspection.

Flight print by Joan Miro

When the Nazis occupied Paris in June 1940, thousands of European refugees fled to the south of France. In August of that year, the young American journalist Varian Fry arrived in Marseilles with a list of imperiled refugees taped to his leg. Over the course of the next year Fry, on behalf of the Emergency Rescue Committee, arranged for the escape of over 1,200 artists, politicians and intellectuals, most to the United States. His work was secretive and dangerous, and ultimately he was expelled from France for protecting Jews and anti-Nazis.

In the mid-1960s, in order to raise funds for what by then had become known as the International Rescue Committee, Fry began assembling a collection of prints on the subject of refugee flight. Twelve artists contributed to the project including several whom Fry had saved during the war: Eugene Berman, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Viera da Silva, Adolph Gottlieb, Wifredo Lam, Jacques Lipchitz, André Masson, Joan Miró, Robert Motherwell, Edouard Pignon, and Fritz Wotruba. 300 copies of the portfolio were produced in 1971 before the artists destroyed the plates.

From time to time, we plan to write about some of the extraordinary prints in the fine art print collection presented to the college in the 1980s by Hugh Chapman. The print shown here is by the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), considered one of the finest of the Baroque period in Western art. “Sancte Roche Ora Pro Nobis” (“Saint Roch Pray for Us”) is an engraving produced in 1626 by Paulus Pontius from Rubens’ drawing. Famous even during his lifetime, Rubens was supported by wealthy patrons including Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua. He also received many commissions from other wealthy members of the nobility. Pontius was an engraver who worked closely with Rubens and was especially known for his portrait engravings. The artwork depicts the sick and other supplicants upon a sheaf of wheat, symbol of prosperity and plenty, seen below an altar, while above, and seemingly accessible by stairs, are Saint Roch, patron saint of dogs who was known for assisting those afflicted by the plague and other diseases, with hat, staff and dog, surrounded by Christ and an angel bearing the sign: “Eris in Peste Patronus” (“You will be a defender of those suffering from pestilence”).

Epidemics arose regularly in Europe in the early modern period during which Rubens flourished. Therefore, it would not have been unusual for him to produce a work combining disease and religion as salvation. Although there is not much in this artwork representative of architecture beyond the altar and a building with windows, the baroque period of architecture was characterized by sensuality, curving lines, emotional and decorative elements, all visible in this work. These forms were favored by the popes, monarchs and the wealthy nobility of Europe, including those who commissioned Rubens.

At the bottom right is the dedicatory phrase “”Cum privilegijs Regis Christianissimi, Serenissimae Infantis et Ordinum Confederatorum,” which translates “With privileges of the Most Christian King and of the Most Serene Infanta and allied orders.” Bret Mulligan, Assistant Professor of Classics, who confirmed the translation, added these most interesting notes: “‘Most Christian King’ is a title reserved for the King of France and ‘Most Serene Infanta’ is a title reserved for daughters of the Portuguese House of Braganza. (They continued using the Latin Infans as a cover for the older gender neutral Infante, but after the 16th century the girls were styled Infanta in the vernacular.) And it turns out ‘With privilege’ and ‘With privileges’ are legal technical terms from before the French Revolution.”