Cloyd Lee Boykin

The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

SPRING/SUMMER 2008

FrenchSculptureRevealed

CONJURING THE

CHINESE GARDEN

THE HISTORY OF

THE TELEPHONE

MICHELANGELO SUPPOSEDLY COULD SEE AN ANGEL

in a block of marble and merely had to carve until he set theapparition free. In our cover feature (page 8), Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell explains how 18th-century French sculptor Jean-

Antoine Houdon released the Roman goddess Diana from the rigidity of tradi-tional portrayals, managing also to transcend his own technical limitations.Thebronze masterpiece from the Arabella D. Huntington Memorial Art Collectionis a highlight of a new Huntington catalog on French art and can be viewed inthe reinstallation gracing the renovated Huntington Art Gallery.

Although Houdon and Diana have stood the test of time,Alexander GrahamBell seems to have feet of clay. Science writer Seth Shulman spent a year at MIT’sDibner Institute and Burndy Library, sifting through documents that suggest Bellhad plagiarized his famous telephone patent (page 18). Shulman explains howhistorians at the institute encouraged him to trust the historical evidence hewas finding there and in other libraries, even when it contradicted the acceptedwisdom about the beloved inventor. Much of the material that he used becamepart of The Huntington’s collections following the acquisition of the BurndyLibrary in 2006.

Researchers like Shulman frequently have to chip away at the myths sur-rounding historical figures. Gary Gallagher takes on the greatest mythmakerof them all—Hollywood (page 4). His critique of Civil War movies reminds usnot only to be skeptical of romanticized versions of the past but also to noticewhat never makes it to the screen.Artist Cloyd Lee Boykin found himself onboth sides of the canvas (page 2), asserting his interpretive skills as a portraitistbut becoming all but invisible after he put down his palette.

Finally,Wango H. C.Weng (page 13) and Martha Andresen (page 15) remindus that the transformative power of great works resides in each of us. In TheHuntington’s new Chinese garden,Weng sees dreamsthat date back centuries intermingling with his own;Andresen hears echoes of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Likeinhabitants of Arden in AsYou Like It, she finds thereand elsewhere at The Huntington “tongues in trees,books in running brooks, Sermons in stones, andgood in every thing.”

MATT STEVENS

The Huntington Library,Art Collections,and Botanical Gardens

SENIOR STAFF OF THE HUNTINGTON

STEVEN S. KOBLIK

President

GEORGE ABDO

Vice President for Advancement

JAMES P. FOLSOM

Marge and ShermTelleen Director of the Botanical Gardens

KATHY HACKER

Executive Assistant to the President

SUSAN LAFFERTY

Nadine and Robert A. Skotheim Director of Education

SUZY MOSER

Assistant Vice President for Advancement

JOHN MURDOCH

Hannah and Russel Kully Director of Art Collections

ROBERT C. RITCHIE

W.M. Keck Foundation Director of

Research and Education

LAURIE SOWD

Associate Vice President for Operations

ALISON D. SOWDEN

Vice President for Financial Affairs

SUSAN TURNER-LOWE

Vice President for Communications

DAVID S. ZEIDBERG

Avery Director of the Library

MAGAZINE STAFF

Editor

MATT STEVENS

Designer

LORI ANN VANDER PLUYM

Huntington Frontiers is published semiannually bythe Office of Communications. It strives to connectreaders more firmly with the rich intellectual life ofThe Huntington, capturing in news and features thework of researchers, educators, curators, and othersacross a range of disciplines.

This magazine is supported in part by theAnnenberg Foundation.

INQUIRIES AND COMMENTS:Matt Stevens, EditorHuntington Frontiers1151 Oxford RoadSan Marino, CA [email protected]

Unless otherwise acknowledged, photography providedby the Huntington’s Department of Photographic Services.

Printed by Pace Lithographers, Inc.City of Industry, Calif.

© 2008 The Huntington Library, Art Collections, andBotanical Gardens.All rights reserved. Reproductionor use of the contents, in whole or in part, withoutpermission of the publisher is prohibited.

Opposite page, upper left: The Huntington’s Garden of FlowingFragrance. Photo by Hongren Lu. Right: Diana the Huntress in its newlocation on the second floor of the Huntington Art Gallery. Photo byTim Street-Porter. Bottom: Telephone operators fielding phone calls atthe Bell Telephone Co., Los Angeles, 1915.

FROM THE EDITOR

BREAKING THE MOLD

HUNTINGTON FRONTIERS 1

[ VOLUME 4, ISSUE 1 ]

GETTING TECHNICAL 8

Two 18th-century French sculpturesBy Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell

DREAMING IN CHINESE 13

Conjuring the Garden of Flowing FragranceByWango H. C.Weng

SHAKESPEARE’S ECHOING SONG 15

Reading sonnets in the Chinese gardenBy Martha Andresen

PLEASE HOLD 18

Rethinking the history of the telephoneBy Seth Shulman

SPRING/SUMMER 2008

DEPARTMENTS

WORK IN PROGRESS: Portrait of the artistBy Kevin M. Murphy 2

ON REFLECTION: Hollywood and the Civil WarBy GaryW.Gallagher 4

IN PRINT: Recommended reading 24

Contents13

818

2 Spring/Summer 2008

Painted into a CornerRESTORING THE LEGACY OF A PORTRAITIST

by Kevin M. Murphy

[ WORK IN PROGRESS ]

PAINTED ABOUT 1913, CLOYD LEE BOYKIN’S

portrait of abolitionist John Brown has muchin common with the 1859 photograph thatinspired it.As in the original photo, Brown is

a well-dressed and dignified figure in a sensitive renderingof the man who was executed for masterminding a raidon the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry,Va.Ten of Brown’smen, including two of his sons, were killed by U.S. Marinesin the aftermath of Brown’s attempt to begin a violentinsurrection to end slavery.

While some considered him a martyr, Brown was alsocastigated for his belief that slavery was an affront to Godthat needed to end at any cost. In fact, other well-knownimages of Brown capture an expression of single-minded

purpose bordering on insanity. In the years after his death,Brown would continue to inspire controversy and debate.And yet, in 1909, shortly before Boykin painted the por-trait, W. E. B. DuBois wrote a sympathetic biography ofBrown, indicating the abolitionist’s lasting legacy to thosefighting for the rights of African Americans. Similarly, inthis portrait Brown appears more elder statesman thanreligious zealot.

While John Brown is a prominent—albeit contradictory—historical figure,much about the life of the artist who paint-ed his portrait remains unknown. Born inVirginia in 1877,Boykin moved to Boston in the early 1900s and studied atthe School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from 1912to 1913. He became known in Boston’s artistic circles for hisportraits of prominent African Americans and abolitionists,

Like John Brown, Boykin’s

fate was in the hands of history,

but worse than vilifying him,

it forgot him.


including William Lloyd Garrison, Booker T.Washington,and Julia Ward Howe. In 1913, an art critic wrote in aBoston newspaper that Boykin’s “excellent” portrait ofFranklin B. Sanborn, an abolitionist who helped financeJohn Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry and later wrote abiography of him, marked “the latest success of the artistwho painted it, Cloyd L. Boykin, a rising young man of

the colored race, who has struggledagainst poverty and failure to makea name for himself in the world ofart.” Boykin likely painted John Brownas part of the series of portraits heexhibited in Boston at this time.Henry E. Huntington acquired itshortly thereafter, although the cir-cumstances that brought the paint-ing to San Marino are a mystery.Huntington curators researched thepainting in the early 1930s, butBoykin’s name did not appear in anyresources on American art, and theportrait has been in storage ever since,largely unseen.

The success of Boykin’s portraitsin Boston led his friends and patronsto raise money to send the artist tostudy in Europe from 1914 to 1915.By 1921 Boykin had moved to NewYork City and participated in the“Negro Arts Exhibit” at the Harlembranch of the NewYork PublicLibrary, which was one of the firstmajor exhibitions of African Americanart. In the late 1920s, at the heightof the Harlem Renaissance, Boykinopened the first art school for AfricanAmericans in the city.Art historianMary Ann Calo, who has writtenabout Boykin as an art educator inHarlem, noted that the school receivedsupport from the Carnegie Foundationand the National Urban League, and,in addition to teaching the fine andapplied arts, held exhibitions of Africanand African American art.Throughhis portraits of figures such as JohnBrown and his exhibitions of Africanart, Boykin sought to connect con-temporary African American cultureto its history.

Boykin’s newfound fame in NewYork was short-lived.He struggled to make a living as an artist and teacher in asegregated society and worked as a janitor to make endsmeet. Ironically, in his role as a janitor, Boykin became theinspiration for a portrait that captured the contradiction ofhis own legacy. Friend and fellow painter Palmer C. Hayden(1890–1973) portrayed Boykin at his job in The JanitorWhoPaints (ca. 1937, now in the Smithsonian American ArtMuseum,Washington, D.C.). Hayden created the work asa protest against stereotypes of occupations considered suit-able for African Americans, telling artist Romare Bearden,“I painted it because no one called Boykin the artist.Theycalled him the janitor.”

Like John Brown, Boykin’s fate was in the hands ofhistory, but worse than vilifying him, it forgot him.Around1935 Boykin moved back to Boston, but soon faded intoobscurity and little else is known of his life, including whereand when he died.Although exhibition records documentBoykin’s active career as an artist in NewYork from the1920s through the early 1930s, only three of his works havebeen located: Franklin B. Sanborn (Massachusetts HistoricalSociety), Abraham Lincoln (private collection), and TheHuntington’s John Brown. �

Kevin M. Murphy is the Bradford and Christine MishlerAssistant Curator of American Art at The Huntington.

Cloyd Lee Boykin’s portrait of John Brown (left), ca. 1913 (28 x 22 in.), isundergoing a conservation analysis as curators consider plans to display itin the future. Boykin is the subject of Palmer C. Hayden’s oil painting TheJanitor Who Paints (above), ca. 1937 (39 1/8 x 32 7/8 in.). SmithsonianAmerican Art Museum, Washington, D.C./Art Resources, N.Y.

Yankee Without a CauseHOW HOLLYWOOD SCREENS THE CIVIL WAR

by Gary W. Gallagher

[ ON REFLECTION ]

ON OCT. 4, 1993, A FULL HOUSE AT

Washington’s National Theatre watchedthe world premiere of Gettysburg, a TurnerPictures film based on Michael Shaara’s

Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Killer Angels. Becausethe Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites hadbeen given a few choice seats, I found myself, as presidentof the organization, in the row occupied by Ted Turnerand a number of his employees. Jeff Daniels, Sam Elliott,and other actors who appeared in the movie sat in thenext row back.

During the four-hour epic, I was intrigued by reactionsamong what was predominantly an insiders’ crowd of CivilWar enthusiasts and people associated with Gettysburg’sproduction. My favorite moment came during the sequencedevoted to Pickett’s Charge, near the climax of whichTurner appeared briefly as Confederate Col.WallerTazewellPatton.As Patton’s infantrymen reached the EmmitsburgRoad just below the main Union defensive line, the camerafocused onTurner, who waved his saber and shouted,“Let’sgo, boys!” Several individuals to my right sprang up andclapped loudly upon hearing their boss utter his line—thenlapsed into awkward silence when Union minié balls cutPatton down two or three seconds later.

Hearty applause swept the house at the end of the film,and during the postscreening gala I heard innumerablecomments about how director Ron Maxwell brought thebattle and its leading characters to life—how the movieconveyed an immediacy and sense of action impossible tocapture in prose.

As one who has read and thought a good deal aboutGettysburg, I found much to consider in both the film andthe audience’s response. Scenes such as the Confederateartillery bombardment preceding Pickett’s Charge impressedme, as did Stephen Lang’s performance as Gen. George E.Pickett. Other elements of the film proved less satisfying.For example, many of the 5,000 reenactors, whose involve-ment helped make the production possible, brought toomany years and too much excess flesh to the task of por-traying Civil War soldiers (one of the Confederates witha speaking part bears a remarkable resemblance to Santa

Films undeniably teach Americans

about the past—to a lamentable

degree in the minds of many

academic historians.


Claus).Whatever quibbles I had with Gettysburg, remarksfrom members of the audience reminded me that filmsstrongly influence perceptions of historical events, and Iwondered what larger understanding of the war viewersmight take away from the movies.

A colorful brochure handed out at the premiere caughtmy eye in this regard. On its cover, Union and Confederatebattle lines face one another against a dramatic, cloud-studded sky. Six words located just above the film’s titlesuggest that the soldiers were all Americans with more toconnect than to divide them, who nonetheless found them-selves trapped in a tragic war:“SAME LAND. SAME GOD.DIFFERENT DREAMS.”

That brochure went into a large file of material I hadbeen collecting on representations of the Civil War in thevisual arts. Long fascinated by how the conflict shows up inpopular culture, I have been especially intrigued over thepast 20 years by films that feature four themes in particular:the Lost Cause, the Union Cause, Emancipation, andReconciliation. For example, my brochure from Gettysburgfits nicely into the theme of Reconciliation, with storiesthat represent an attempt by white people North and South

to extol the American virtues both sides manifested duringthe war, exalt the restored nation that emerged from theconflict, and mute the role of African Americans.A filmlike Glory plays up Emancipation, interpreting the war asa struggle to liberate 4 million slaves and remove a cancerousinfluence on American society and politics.

The theme of the Lost Cause flourished in films fornearly half a century before losing ground, and eventualsupremacy, to Emancipation and Reconciliation. Films thatembrace the Lost Cause cast the conflict as an admirablestruggle against hopeless odds.They also deemphasize theimportant role slavery played in spurring secession and warwhile focusing on the gallantry Confederates displayed onthe battlefield. Much of the Lost Cause success grew fromHollywood’s two most popular and influential Civil War–related films—The Birth of a Nation, director D.W. Griffith’ssilent-era blockbuster release in 1915, and Gone with theWind, producer David O. Selznick’s 1939 treatment ofMargaret Mitchell’s best-selling novel of the same name.

Although Gone with theWind marked the apogee ofCivil War films focusing on the theme of the Lost Cause,the 25 succeeding years yielded a number of major films

Two themes in Civil War films are Reconciliation and Emancipation. In this scene from the movie Gettysburg (opposite), Confederate Brig. Gen. Lewis A.Armistead (Richard Jordon) suffers from a mortal wound but finds the strength to make a reconciliationist speech about his affection for the Union’s Maj. Gen.Winfield Scott Hancock. In Glory (above), Private Trip (Denzel Washington) and his fellow soldiers from the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment fight to endslavery. Photofest.


that handled the Old South and the Confederacy gently.Shenandoah marked a watershed in Hollywood’s relationshipwith the Lost Cause. Released in 1965, not long after con-gressional passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it shunsglorification of the plantation South and, most tellingly,places slavery at the center of the war.The film focuses onthe nonslaveholding family of Charlie Anderson (JimmyStewart), who lives on a prosperous 500-acre farm inVirginia’s ShenandoahValley during the last autumn ofthe war.While earlier films had grossly exaggerated thedegree to which slaves remained loyal to their masters,Shenandoah distorts historical reality by showing integratedU.S. military units.

Shenandoah stands as more of an Emancipation than aLost Cause narrative. It proved to be the last CivilWar filmproduced until Glory in 1989.The next 14 years yieldedGettysburg, Pharaoh’s Army,Andersonville,Gods and Generals,and Cold Mountain. Sommersby,Dances withWolves, LittleWomen,Gangs of NewYork, The Last Samurai, and SeraphimFalls, all of which touched on the conflict to a greater orlesser degree, added to a cinematic bounty that coincidedwith the expansion of general interest in the war.

I am fully aware that Hollywood’s overriding goal isto provide entertainment that will earn profits. Studios,producers, and directors seldom have a didactic purpose.They focus on plots and characters that create and sustaindramatic momentum. Selznick almost certainly neverissued these instructions to an underling:“Find me a goodpiece of material laying out the Lost Cause interpretationof the Confederate experience.The dramatic potential isimportant but will be secondary to our getting the inter-pretation right.”

Neither would anyone in Hollywood insist that a histor-ical drama, above all, reflect the insights of the best recentscholarship—at least not anyone who hopes to attract andsatisfy paying customers.The complexity of scholarly inves-tigation translates poorly to cinematic treatments in whichimages and sound often take precedence over dialogue.Freddie Fields, who produced Glory, spoke directly to thispoint in 1989. Reacting to complaints that the film got

some historical details wrong, he observed:“You can getbogged down when dealing in history. Our objective wasto make a highly entertaining and exciting war moviefilled with action and character.”

Yet films undeniably teach Americans about the past—to a lamentable degree in the minds of many academichistorians. More people have formed perceptions about theCivil War from watching Gone with theWind than fromreading all the books written by historians since Selznick’sblockbuster debuted.

Of the four main themes, Union is Hollywood’s reallost cause. It lags far behind Emancipation and, to a lesserdegree, Reconciliation.No scene in any recent film capturesthe abiding devotion to the Union that animated soldiersand civilians in the North.This is somewhat understandable.Long pieces of explanatory dialogue about Union as anemotional and political focus would bring narrative momen-tum to a halt.Yet a number of films demonstrate what asingle scene could accomplish. In Casablanca, the singing of“La Marseillaise” in Rick’s bar as the camera moves fromone passionate face to the next communicates devotion toa French nation humbled by German military power. Moreto the point,Gone with theWind’s fancy ball, staged withConfederate flags and a huge portrait of Jefferson Davis

No scene in any recent film cap-

tures the abiding devotion to the

Union that animated soldiers and

civilians in the North.


[ ON REFLECTION ]

much in evidence, creates a strong sense of the kind ofnational purpose that would prompt women such asMelanie Wilkes to contribute their wedding rings tosupport southern armies.Glory,Gettysburg, and Gods and Generals, all of which deal

extensively with Union soldiers, contribute almost nothingto an understanding of the Union Cause.Apart from ColonelShaw’s brief mention of Union in his mustering-in speechin Glory, Joshua Chamberlain’s remarks about enlisting tosave the Union before realizing the conflict had meaningonly as an effort to abolish slavery in both Gettysburg andGods and Generals, and Tom Chamberlain’s casting Unionas a secondary goal of the war in Gettysburg, these threemainline Civil War films remain silent on the topic.

Recent films not only fail to explain the Union Cause,they also depict U.S. military forces in strikingly negativeways. In reality Union soldiers destroyed civilian property,engaged in some atrocities, and otherwise behaved badly—much like their Confederate counterparts.The scholarlyliterature, however, makes clear that most of them avoidedsuch activities. Hollywood’s collective portrait departsradically from the scholarly consensus. Except in Gettysburg

and Gods and Generals, white soldiers in blue fare poorly.Hollywood serves up a post-Vietnam vision of the Unionarmy as a cruel, racist juggernaut that wreaks havoc andstands for nothing admirable. It looks remarkably like U.S.military forces inVietnam as imagined by Francis FordCoppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), Oliver Stone’s Platoon(1986), Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), BrianDe Palma’s Casualties ofWar (1989), and other such films.

Anyone knowing little about the conflict would comeaway from recent films with strong impressions about theNorth’s Civil War.Almost all of the admirable characterswage a war for emancipation.The Union army harborsmany white soldiers capable of great brutality towardcivilians.These men express profoundly racist views andoften appear to be inept, cowardly, or even deranged.Apart from those devoted to emancipation, Federals sub-scribe to no guiding set of principles—certainly nothingconnected to the Union. In sum viewers will find strongechoes of the Emancipation Cause and to a lesser extentthe Reconciliation Cause.They will not form any appre-ciation of the Union Cause.

This absence of a strong Union theme must be readon one level as a triumph for the Lost Cause.Why have theUnion Cause and its military forces failed to generate moreemotional appeal? Part of the answer lies in the nebulousnature of a fight to save “the Union.”The other twonorthern themes lend themselves to simple formulations:emancipation meant freeing the slaves, and reconciliationmeant bringing Americans back together after a periodof sectional alienation and slaughter. Both focus on clearoutcomes almost all modern Americans see as desirable.A tougher challenge awaits anyone who tries to explainwhy Union, a word and concept no longer part of ourpolitical vocabulary, mattered so much. �

GaryW.Gallagher is John L. Nau III Professor in the History ofthe American CivilWar at the University ofVirginia. In 2001–02,he was the Times-Mirror Foundation Distinguished Fellow atThe Huntington.

Adapted from CausesWon, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular ArtShapeWhatWe Know about the CivilWar by Gary W. Gallagher. © 2008 by theUniversity of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher(www.uncpress.unc.edu).

The theme of the Lost Cause is well represented in Civil War films, while thecause of the Union hasn’t made its way out of the archives. In the movieGettysburg, Martin Sheen and Tom Berenger embody the gallantry of Gen. RobertE. Lee and Lt. Gen. James Longstreet at a Confederate camp (opposite). A scrap-book photo from The Huntington shows an equally dignified Major GeneralHancock in his own camp, posing with division commanders who are com-mitted to the cause of the Union (above). Photofest and Huntington Library.

At the entrance to the east wing of the secondfloor of the HuntingtonArt Gallery, a solitaryfemale figure stands sentinel.Her body is slen-

der and athletic, her expression serene and aloof.She seems to be in motion yet has an etherealquality of weightlessness. She is Diana, the Romangoddess of the moon, the forest, and the hunt.

When the French sculptor Jean-AntoineHoudon (1741–1828) first unveiled Diane chas-seresse (Diana the Huntress) in 1782, the six-footmasterpiece was praised by critics for achievingthe grace of the classical Greek and Roman stat-uary that had inspired it.

“But there was actually something quite dif-ferent in this particular interpretation of the god-dess Diana,” says UC Riverside professor MalcolmBaker, a contributor to the newly released cata-log French Art of the Eighteenth Century at TheHuntington. “Houdon’s composition offers anelement of surprise because it doesn’t cast her ina standard way.”

In both antiquity and the Renaissance, theRoman goddess of the hunt traditionally was rep-resented two distinct ways: nude, at her bath,inspired by a scene from the story of Diana andActaeon in Ovid’s narrative poemMetamorphoses;orclothed for the hunt,usually in a short,belted tunic.

TechnicalGetting

Shedding new light on

two masterpieces of

18th-century sculpture

by Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell

Houdon chose to portray Dianaboth nude and hunting, moving for-ward with her bow and arrow ready.The sculptor references Diana’s classicaland Renaissance antecedents, yet com-bines them in an entirely modern way.

Baker notes that the piece was val-ued not only for its beauty but alsobecause it employed the cutting-edgetechnology of the time. “The publicappreciated the technical innovationand ambition of casting a figure likeDiana,” Baker says.

Houdon was the leading portraitartist of the Enlightenment, a periodof dynamic intellectual and politicalactivity in 18th-century Europe. Hissubjects included Voltaire, Diderot,Rousseau, and Napoleon. He alsoknew and sculpted many of America’sfounding fathers, such as GeorgeWashington, Benjamin Franklin, andThomas Jefferson; Houdon’s iconicbust of Jefferson is well known to mostAmericans because it is reproducedon the nickel.

Unlike many of his contemporaries,Houdon cast his own pieces rather thancontracting the work to a foundry. Forhis first attempt at the difficult anddangerous process of casting in the indi-rect lost-wax method, using moltenbronze and boiling wax to create a hol-low sculpture, Houdon chose a stun-ningly ambitious composition. Theenormous figure is running, precari-ously balanced on one foot;her muscu-lar, elongated limbs recall Renaissancedepictions of Diana. A single interiorrod supports her from the ball of herfoot to the top of her head.The sculp-ture is designed to be seen in the roundand appreciated from all angles.

Houdon’s daring and ingenious featwas partly motivated by professionalpride. He had originally hoped thatthe bronze would grace the collectionof King Louis XVI, but the monarchrejected Houdon’s proposal on thegrounds that the price was too high

and that the sculptor,who was knownprimarily for working in marble, wasthought to be ill-equipped to carry outthe complex commission.But Houdonsucceeded, and a wealthy Paris mer-chant, Jean Girardot de Marigny, pur-chased Diana for the garden of his Paris

townhouse on the rue Vivienne. Sixyears later, Houdon surpassed himselfby casting a companion piece,Apollo, ina single pour in front of an audience—a calculated publicity stunt. Apollo isnow in the Museu Calouste Gulbenkianin Lisbon, Portugal.Diana was one of the most popu-

lar works of the 18th century. It wascopied in a variety of sizes and media,including terra-cotta, marble, andinexpensive plaster, both in the18th century and later. Houdonhimself created at least five life-size versions of the subject,including a marble owned byCatherine the Great.

Although the modern artmarket has drawn sharp andsometimes artificial distinctionsbetween “originals” and “copies,”sculptors like Houdon routinelymade several versions of their most

famous pieces. (In 1790, Houdon casta second bronze Diana, now in theLouvre.) This practice allowed themto maximize their profits whilereaching the widest possible audi-ence. Baker points out that “thereproduction of a sculpture often

While Houdon’s life-size Diana is

a marvel of technical and stylistic

innovation, intended for public

display, Madame de Vermenoux is

an intimate portrait of an admired

friend and patron.

Jean-Antoine Houdon’s Diana the Huntress (opposite)stands six feet tall. Henry E. Huntington aquired it in1927, along with the marble bust Anne-GermaineLarrivée, Madame Paul-Louis Girardot de Vermenoux(right). They can be seen on the second floor of theHuntington Art Gallery when the historic house reopensin late May.


Conservation is not the same as restoration, the old-fashioned practice of trying to make decaying or dam-aged objects look as good as new. Instead, conservationstabilizes objects in a sympathetic, non-invasive way, respecting the originalmaterials and the artist’s intentions,and preserving evidence of the objects’history. Materials, markings, and con-struction techniques offer conservatorsclues about how, when, where, andby whom an artwork was made; lateralterations, damages, and repairs pro-vide an equally valuable record of itsprovenance, or ownership history.

It is no easy task to X-ray a 225-year-old, 6-foot, 747-pound hunk of bronze. Transporting Diana from its pedestal in theHuntington Art Gallery to the Getty Museum’s hilltop conservation lab was a heroic undertaking in its own right.

Getty conservator Jane Bassett X-rayed the piece in small sections by strapping sheets of film directly to Diana’s limbs. The time-consuming process revealed that the sculpture was cast in seven sections (not including the base, arrow, and bow) using the indirectlost-wax method, which allowed for the casting of hollow bronzes on a large scale and in multiples. In the direct lost-wax method,the sculptor’s model is destroyed in the casting process, preventing replication, and the resulting sculpture is solid, necessitatinga small size. Both methods have been in use since antiquity.

X-ray fluorescence (XRF) determined the exact chemical composition of the material (bronze is an alloy of copper, zinc, and tin).The XRF machine is designed for use on small samples, and one of Bassett’s toughest challenges was applying it to the enormoussculpture. “We couldn’t manipulate the sculpture, so we had to manipulate the XRF machine,” she says. Her tests confirmed that allof the sections are original, rather than later replacements or repairs—a testimony to Houdon’s skillful manipulation of the bronze.

—Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell

Heavy LiftingThe

Jane Bassett attaching sheets of film to Diana inthe Getty Museum’s conservation lab. The X-rayof the left hand shows the joints in the separatelycast pieces of the bow.

It is no easy task to X-ray a225-year-old, 6-foot, 747-pound hunk of bronze.


enhanced the authority of the origi-nal and the status of its author, ratherthan diminishing the significance ofboth.” Sculptures were made to becopied; the indirect lost-wax methodwas an effective technique for makingvery accurate replicas of bronzes, usingthe same mold each time.

Coincidentally, the patron who pur-chased Diana has a connection toanother Houdon sculpture in the

Huntington collections.Marigny’s sister-in-law sat for the portrait bust Anne-Germaine Larrivée,Madame deVermenoux.While Houdon’s life-size Diana is amarvel of technical and stylistic innova-tion, intended for public display,MadamedeVermenoux is an intimate portrait ofan admired friend and patron. Dianais the artist’s first sculpture in bronze,using groundbreaking casting tech-niques;Madame deVermenoux is carvedfrom a single, massive block of fine-grained white marble, polished totranslucence. Far from a lifeless blockof stone, Houdon’s marble suggestsmovement, texture, and shadows, suchas his characteristic, innovative treat-ment of the eyes: within a hollow iris,a deeply drilled pupil and a tiny pegof stone imitate the reflection of light.

While Houdon proudly promotedDiana to advertise his skill as a sculptor,his portrait of Madame deVermenouxhas been shrouded in mystery since itsfirst, anonymous appearance asMadamede *** in the Salon of 1777.By the timeHenry E. Huntington purchased thepiece from the art dealer Joseph Duveenin 1927, its identity had become con-fused with an earlier Houdon portraitof Baroness de la Houze, the wife ofthe French ambassador to Denmark,and it was displayed under that name inthe Arabella D. Huntington MemorialArt Collection galleries.But the Baronessde la Houze label was always uncon-vincing; for one thing, the bust is

dated 1777, and the baroness died in1774. Scholars speculated that the bustwas actually a portrait of Louis XV’smistress,Madame Du Barry,or a mem-ber of the French royal family.

“This was assumed to be a partic-ularly grand piece,” Baker says. “She’srepresented as if she’s an aristocrat.The scale and the bravura quality giveit a sort of royal air.” It was not until2003 that Anne Poulet, now directorof the Frick Collection in NewYork,correctly identified the sitter.That yearboth Houdon sculptures were on loanfor the traveling international exhibi-tion “Jean-Antoine Houdon: Sculptorof the Enlightenment” shown at the J.Paul Getty Museum. Poulet was thecurator of the show and was workingon the exhibition catalog.

In her research, she discovered thatthe artist Gabriel de Saint-Aubin hadseen the bust on display at the Salonand made a quick sketch of it in hiscopy of the unillustrated Salon catalognext to the entry for Madame de ***.That catalog survives, and Poulet spot-ted the resemblance to the Huntingtonpiece, and to surviving portraits ofMadame de Vermenoux. It did nottake much more sleuthing to uncoverthe identity of “Madame de ***”; itwas an open secret, and copies of thepiece were sold under Madame deVermenoux’s name.

It is possible that Houdon himselftook more than a professional interestin his subject, for he lavished attentionon her slightly parted lips, her fashion-able hairstyle, and her expensive lace-trimmed garments.Baker also sees thesculptor showing off.“He plays aroundwith the idea and conceit of the bust,”he says.“The drapery extends beyondthe truncation, alerting the viewer tothe fact that this is a piece of sculpture,despite the realistic portrayal of the fleshand drapery.”

Jane Bassett, conservator of Europeansculpture and decorative arts at theGetty Museum, made a discovery

of her own when X-raying the Dianasculpture (see “The Heavy Lifting”).Observant visitors may have noticedthat the dedication below Houdon’ssignature on Diana’s base was partiallyobscured at some point and is nowbarely discernible. Bassett’s X-rayrevealed that the original inscription,“Pour Jn. Girardot de Marigny. Nègo-ciant á Paris” (“For Jean Girardot deMarigny.Merchant in Paris”), has beenaltered; the phrase “Nègociant á Paris”was carefully effaced. It is interesting tospeculate whether Houdon’s client didnot wish to be identified by his profes-sion, or whether a later owner tried toenhance the value of the piece by eras-ing its connection to a mere merchant.

Although Bassett relished the chanceto X-ray Diana in the Getty’s state-of-the-art conservation lab, she concededan equal pleasure in viewing anothersculpture with her naked eye. SeeingMadame deVermenoux in the round, innatural light, she says,“highlighted whata tremendous masterpiece it is.” �

Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell was theAndrewW. Mellon Foundation CuratorialFellow in French Art at The Huntingtonfrom 2003 to 2007.She contributed to theFrench art catalog and managed the day-to-day operations of the project. She is cur-rently the Maggie Pexton Murray ResearchScholar at the LosAngeles County Museumof Art.


While Jane Bassett was busy weighing and X-raying sculpture,a whole team of specialist conservators worked behind the sceneson the rest of The Huntington’s French art collection, makingdetailed technical examinations—and surprising discoveries.

Because of limited time and funds, conservators were chargedwith writing descriptive reports on the structure and condition ofeach object for the catalog French Art of the Eighteenth Centuryat The Huntington rather than performing treatments. One excep-tion: a major grant from the Institute of Museum and LibraryServices funded the conservation of a fragile suite of 10 Gobelinschairs and two settees designed by François Boucher—a metic-ulous, thread-by-thread task that took conservator Sharon Shoreof the Culver City conservation firm Caring for Textiles almostfive years. Shore also pored over the collection’s vast Beauvaistapestries, literally counting threads in areas of the tapestrieswith a small magnifying device called a linen tester.

John Childs of Historic New England, a regional preservationorganization, dismantled 300-year-old pieces of French furni-ture, taking them down to their wooden bases or “carcasses.”Every screw, handle, and porcelain plaque was labeled andphotographed so Childs could put it back exactly as it was.This laborious process provided important information aboutmaterials and construction techniques and sometimes evenrevealed signatures, dates, and 18th-century price tags. Oneof the most exciting finds of the project was the discovery of asecret (but, unfortunately, empty) drawer in a Directoire com-mode, overlooked for at least a hundred years.

Linda Strauss, director of collections at the Autry NationalCenter, was in charge of the gilt bronze objects, including can-delabra, clocks, and mounted porcelain. She, too, dismantledmany artworks, uncovering new information about their prove-nance and construction. An absence of foot rims beneath French-made gilt bronze mounts provided an important clue that apair of Meissen porcelain vases was produced for export toFrance. One ornate candelabrum was made of 92 separatepieces of metal; other candelabra had been wired for elec-tricity early in the 20th century.

Independent conservator Rosamond Westmoreland removedcanvasses from their frames to expose hidden tacks, labels, andstretchers. At least two of the French paintings had been cutdown: David’s oil sketch of Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Étienne wasoriginally a double portrait, and Ah! Qu’il est joli by NicolasLancret was once a rectangle, not an oval. A handheld infraredlamp revealed areas of retouching or reworking, called penti-menti (Italian for “repentances”).

Independent conservator Carol Aiken examined the 14 goldboxes featured in the catalog. Though they are decorated withprecious materials and intricate miniature paintings, the boxeswere made with practicality in mind. They were designed to fitneatly in the palm of the hand, and their hinged lids werecarefully engineered to provide an airtight seal for storing snuffor finely grated tobacco. Aiken located microscopic stamps indi-cating each box’s maker and date.

Independent conservator Odile Madden and MaureenRussell, conservator to the state of New Mexico, found similarstamps and marks on the Sèvres porcelain pieces. Unlike theother conservators, they worked without gloves in order to keepa better grip on the slick glazed surfaces of the fragile pieces.Madden even swore off coffee while working on the project,for fear that the caffeine would make her hands shake.

—Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell

HandsHelping

Conservator Sharon Shore at work on one of 10 chairs with tapestry upholsteryafter designs by François Boucher.


Now is the time for enjoyment—what a dream that has been trans-formed into reality! Observing the Chinese calligraphy on eachbuilding and every scenic spot of The Huntington’s new garden,

one can gather that there are many literary references behind these fancynames. Interestingly, some of the prominent ones are related to dreams.

Dreaming inChinese

by Wango H. C. Weng

A dedication speechconjures a new garden

Take the name of the garden,Flowing Fragrance, or Liu FangYuan:it comes from the prose poem byPrince Cao Zhi of the second to thirdcentury (192–232),who described hisencounter with the Goddess of RiverLuo, an unearthly beauty who steppedon scented flora with flowing fragrance.That incident must be a dream.

Then the name Hall of the JadeCamellia,orYu MingTang,comes fromthe residence of Tang Xianzu of the16th to 17th century (1550–1616),whose celebrated play Peony Pavilionfeatured an episode known as “Visitingthe Garden and Stricken by a Dream,”which was later turned into a popularopera,Youyuan Jingmeng.The protago-nist, Du Liniang, is a beautiful maidensuddenly smitten by a handsome youngscholar in her dream while dozing offin her family garden.This led to a fan-tastic melodrama that may appear tobe preposterous to our modern minds,but the author’s heartrending lineshave captured the Chinese audiencefor more than 350 years.

Now we come to the Bridge ofthe Joy of Fish, orYu Le Qiao, a name

inspired by the story of Zhuang Zhou,a Daoist philosopher of the fourthcentury B.C. equal in fame and influ-ence to Laozi. He argued with hisfriend about his knowledge of the joyof fish, winning by logic and empathy.He is better known for his dream ofbecoming a butterfly, when he won-dered if it wasn’t really the butterflywho dreamt of becoming ZhuangZhou. Both stories express his cosmicview of the world.

Finally, let us join the peach gardenparty of Tang poet Li Bai (701–762),whose essay for the occasion beginswith these immortal lines:“Heaven andEarth are an inn for myriad beings,Time is the passenger for endless gen-erations. Life is like a dream,how muchjoy can we gain from it?”

Our answer is here and now. Fordreams create gardens, and gardens cre-ate dreams. Let us celebrate and enjoy,and dream on for the completion of theentire Garden of Flowing Fragrance! �

Wango H. C.Weng is a calligrapher, artcollector,and member of the Chinese GardenAdvisory Committee, which helped selectthe name of the garden. He delivered thekeynote address at the dedication of LiuFangYuan on Feb.16,2008.His collectionof paintings and calligraphy will be on dis-play at The Huntington in spring 2009.

夢中造園園裡尋夢

Below: Wango Weng at his home in New Hampshire. Photo courtesy WIQAN ANG/Boston Globe/Landov.Previous page: The Hall of the Jade Camellia, or Yu Ming Tang. Photo by Lisa Blackburn.

Dreams create gardens,

and gardens create dreams.


ECHOING SONG

in the

GARDEN OF

FLOWING

FRAGRANCE

by Martha Andresen

ShakeSpeare’S

Among my pleasures atThe Huntington isto imagine I inhabit the Forest of Arden,a green world where encounters happen

that surprise and renew. I hear Duke Senior inShakespeare’s As You Like It, a character cheerfullyremoved from the bustle of city and court who findseverywhere “a living art” that speaks, bringing joy:

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,Finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks,Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.(2.1.15–17)

As a Shakespearean, I relish above all the rare booksin The Huntington’s matchless collections, for theLibrary is the heart of the enterprise, a home andhaven to research scholars everywhere.But Shakespearespeaks to me in the galleries, too.Here, J.M.W.Turner’spainting The Grand Canal,Venice: Shylock converseswith The Merchant of Venice; Joshua Reynolds’ SarahSiddons as theTragic Muse whispers of Lady Macbeth;BenjaminWest’s The Meeting of Lear and Cordelia echoesLear’s words,“Be your tears wet?”

Shakespeare“finds tongues”on the grounds and inthe gardens too.Under a great English oak planted by


Henry E.Huntington’s superintendentWilliam Hertrich nearly a century ago,I glimpse Falstaff in The MerryWives ofWindsor, crowned with horns, trickedand trembling by Herne’s Oak inWindsor Forest at midnight. Imaginingthe restored house and the bloomingRose Garden by moonlight, I remem-ber luminous verse from A MidsummerNight’s Dream.Wandering through theDesert or Jungle or Australian gardens,I conjure up the“brave new world”ofTheTempest. In the Shakespeare Garden,of course, every flower and plant findsa voice in the plays and poems.

Most recently, in the Chinese gar-den, I have discovered Shakespeare’s“echoing song.” Liu Fang Yuan, theGarden of Flowing Fragrance, is mod-

eled after a scholar’s garden of the Mingperiod (1368–1644), an era parallelingthe late medieval/early modern periodin England, including Shakespeare’s life-time (1564–1616).No direct influencecan be argued,of course,but can we findthere illuminating resonances betweenquintessential arts of East andWest? Canwe discover a gateway to each, a pathto inhabiting and experiencing eachworld? Above the entry to Liu FangYuan, Chinese characters beckon uswith these words:“Another world liesbeyond.”Might we imagine a gatewayto Shakespeare’s intricate sonnets? Abridge between East andWest?An entryto another world—that lies within?

To experience the Chinese garden,I discovered during several visits, we

must slow down and pause for a time,leaving behind the frenzy of our lives,quieting the distraction and distresswithin. Entering the gate, we mustfocus our eyes, our senses, and ourmind’s eye too. New sights await us,and sounds of flowing water, scents offlowing fragrances.That “other worldbeyond” is animated with life butcomposed and cultivated by art. Eachwindow and gateway frames a prospectcontaining great dualities and vibrantenergies of temporality and eternity innature and human life.The waters oftime, flowing in streams or waterfalls,or pooling and reflective in the placidlake, are set in contrast to static struc-tures of more permanence, the humanarchitecture of carved bridges and

Each window and gateway frames a prospect containinggreat dualities and vibrant energies of temporality

and eternity in nature and human life.

constructed pavilions, as well as thenatural architecture of elemental, time-scoured limestone rocks bordering all.Mountains tower above, offering aprospect of sublime immensity and asymbol of eternity. Below them clus-ter abundant trees, plants, and flowers,manifestations of seasonality, thosecycles of life and death, blossoming andshedding, dormancy and renewal thatencompass human life, too. In the gar-den’s every detail, as we learn to readits forms and features, its symbols andsignificances,we may discover the con-centrated essences of things. It is indeeda “flowing fragrance,” a rare perfumeof nature and art—exquisitely distilledso as to awaken and enlighten.

So too is the art of Shakespeare’ssonnets: the sonnet is also a distillationof form and feeling, intellect and senses.It, too,captures the concentrated essenceof things.Once we find a gate or win-dow into this interior poetic world,wemay discover prospects on life and anglesof vision as a greatWestern artist voicesthem,his subjective “I” a locale at once

personal and universal.To learn to reada sonnet’s form and features, its symbolsand significances, is to discover there ahuman nature defined by culture andnature, a domain of vibrant imagerythat speaks of youth and age, mortalityand immortality, friendship and love,ideals exalted or betrayed, and our per-petual state of conflict and ambivalence:“Two loves I have, of comfort anddespair” (Sonnet 144).The sonnet is aminiature frame, strict in line-length,stanza and couplet structure, and pat-terns of rhythm and rhyme. And yetthis small, contrived poetic structureevokes a spacious, dynamic interiorlocale where the poet takes us anddoubly moves us. He touches us andhe guides us along, moving throughcomplex processes of feeling andthought, through layered dimensionsof time (past, present, and future), everseeking (as we all do) a clearer prospecton things, ever attempting a coupletresolution while inviting passionateengagement as well as philosophicaldetachment. In so doing, the poet may

exalt or excoriate, he may urge accept-ance or consolation, but he must drawus in. To read a sonnet is—in thissense—like entering a garden.Here wemust pause, be patient, notice detail,open our minds and hearts to the com-posed prospect of sharp contrasts, rel-ishing their beauties, interpreting theirsymbols,open to the pleasures of awak-ening and enlightenment they offer.Perhaps Shakespeare’s sonnets, like theChinese garden, offer a window to ashared world, East or West—and tothe soul. �

Martha Andresen is professor of Englishemerita at Pomona College.With LouisFantasia, she is planning a Shakespeareseries at The Huntington this fall on theeve of the 2008 election: “Shakespeare’sPolitical Landscapes: Rome, London,Agincourt, Elsinore.”

A visitor (below) takes in the view from the rooftop of the Hall of the Jade Camellia. Other prospects include spring-blooming wisteria (page 15) growingagainst the backdrop of the Pavilion for Washing Away Thoughts and a vantage point from the Love for the Lotus Pavilion (opposite). The photos by JohnSullivan can be found in a forthcoming book on the making of the Garden of Flowing Fragrance. Available this coming winter, it contains essays by WangoWeng and Chinese garden curator June Li, among others.

As a journalist who specializes in scienceand technology, I have long been inter-ested in invention—how it occurs and

how it is remembered. So I jumped at theopportunity to spend a year as a science-writer-in-residence at the Dibner Institute for theHistory of Science and Technology at MIT.(The institute’s research and fellowship programhas been reconstituted at The Huntington inmodified form following the acquisition of theaffiliated Burndy Library in 2006.) It was thefirst time the institute had invited a writer tojoin in the program’s seminars and discussiongroups.And it was my first experience work-ing alongside a group of historians. Given myinterest in inventors, I had proposed to do ayear of research on the relationship betweentwo towering icons:Thomas Alva Edison andAlexander Graham Bell.

Late one October evening during the fel-lowship year, I was working in the plush officeI had been given at MIT. On my computerscreen, courtesy of the Library of Congress,was a high-resolution, digital reproduction ofAlexander Graham Bell’s laboratory notebookfrom 1875 and 1876, exactly as he had writtenit in his own hand.


PleaseHOLDRethinkingthe history ofthe telephoneBy Seth Shulman

The images lacked only the mustysmell of the notebook’s leather bindingand the brittle feel of its lined pages. Inevery other respect, they offered a per-fect facsimile, allowing the viewer tofollow Bell’s work straight from hisown fountain pen. In some passages, Ithought I could even roughly gaugeBell’s excitement from the way hisscript got scratchy when he wrotemore hurriedly.

I lost track of how late it was get-ting. Somewhere around midnight, Ireached Bell’s accounts from March1876, the period of his momentousbreakthrough with the telephone.

An entry jumped out at me.Bell’s research notes on March 8

shift to some strikingly new ideas aftermonths of slow, incremental work.Onthat day, for the first time, Bell inex-plicably adds to his experiments a dishof water laced with sulfuric acid. Hestill uses a reed and a magnet at oneend of the circuit he is building but,seemingly from nowhere,he introducesa striking contraption: a diaphragm

with a needle sticking through it intothe acidic water to complete the elec-trical circuit. From that entry on, someliquid or another becomes a feature ina quick succession of experiments. Justa day and a half after introducing thisnew scheme,Bell has his amazing suc-cess calling to Watson next door.

What made Bell think of dipping aneedle into liquid in his transmitter, Iwondered, after a steady diet for morethan a year of reeds,magnets, and bat-teries in widely varied configurations?

I viewed the shift as a sign of Bell’sgenius. I made a note to that effect inmy own handwritten journal that night.I was especially struck by Bell’s shift in

thinking because I’ve found that kindof magic often seems to inhabit themoment of discovery: that instant whensomething formerly unknowable,beyond reach, becomes forever clear.

But then I noticed that there was a12-day gap between Bell’s entries at theend of February and those beginning inMarch,when he had just returned froma trip toWashington,D.C., to sort outwhat he described as a “patent mud-dle.” Bell’s telephone patent had beenthreatened with a formal declarationof “interference,” the term the U.S.Patent Office uses when two or moreinventors apply for patents of overlap-ping inventions at the same time.

I soon learned that the filing thatconflicted with Bell’s telephone patentcame from a now-mostly-forgottenelectrical researcher named Elisha Gray.In the case of the telephone, I learned,Gray had filed what the Patent Officecalled a “caveat,” which provided aninventor up to a year with an exclu-sive right to turn his or her idea intoa working, patentable invention. Gray

The Huntington collections contain materials related to the entire history of the telephone, including photo archives from the Southern California Edison Co.(detail, opposite page) and the Harold A. Parker Studio (below), which includes this photograph of telephone operators at the switchboard at Home TelephoneCo. in Pasadena, 1914. The resources have expanded considerably following the recent acquisition of the Burndy Library.

I unearthed enoughinformation to raiseserious doubtsabout Bell as thesole inventor of thetelephone.

had proposed to use a liquid in histelephone transmitter:water with acidin it. That fact alone seemed like aremarkable coincidence.

But Gray’s sketch for his invention,on page 3 of his patent claim, hit mealmost like a shock from the electriccurrent it described. I recognizedimmediately that I had already seen avirtually identical drawing—in Bell’slab notebook.

The implication was instantly clear.Unless I was somehow mistaken, Bellmust have returned to his lab in Bostonfrom his trip to Washington, droppedhis prior line of inquiry, and drawn analmost perfect replica of his competi-tor’s invention in his own notebook,complete with a near-identical imageof a face peering down into the device.

I was dumbfounded.Could Bell have

committed such a blatant,wholesale actof plagiarism? My question would proveto be the start of a year-long intriguethat would redirect my research and takeover my life. Luckily for me, I was sur-rounded by roughly one dozen DibnerFellows—all accomplished historianswho had much to teach me about howto get to the bottom of such a vexingintrigue at the heart of one of theworld’s most important inventions.

Iwas still pondering the questionof whether Bell could have stolenthe idea for the telephone when

David Cahan, my colleague from thenext office at the institute, knocked onmy door.Cahan, a friendly man with abig Midwestern smile and slightlystooped shoulders that made him seemat once warm and professional, taught

the history of science at the Universityof Nebraska.As fate would have it, hewas also a leading specialist on scienceand technology in Alexander GrahamBell’s day.

“I’m not ready to share this widelyyet, but if you have a minute, there issomething I’d love to get your adviceabout.” Shuffling through the paperson my desk, I placed the photocopiesof Gray’s caveat and Bell’s version ofthe liquid transmitter side by side onthe corner of the desk and explainedhow I had happened upon them.

“If the facts are just as you say,”Cahan offered,“it would seem that youreally could have something here. Ofcourse there is more I would want toknow. The key thing that comes tomind is the danger of Whiggism. Doyou know about Whiggism?”


Alexander Graham Bell’s sketch in his notebook onMarch 9, 1876 (inset), bears an uncanny resemblanceto Elisha Gray’s caveat, a confidential document filedat the U.S. Patent Office almost three weeks earlier.Library of Congress, Alexander Graham Bell FamilyPapers; U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.


Seeing the blank look on my faceas I struggled to imagine what Toriesand Whigs had to do with the inven-tion of the telephone,Cahan proceededin his soft-spoken and collegial way tooffer me a learned thumbnail on histo-riography—the study of the study ofhistory. “Whiggism,” Cahan said, wasthe historical pitfall of not seeing thingsin their own context but rather judgingthe past by the norms or standard of thepresent.The term likely derived fromthe penchant of certain politically alle-giant historians in Britain to write his-tory in terms that favored their ownparty. In the history of science and tech-nology, Cahan explained,“Whiggism”meant assuming knowledge that one’shistorical subjects would have lacked:giving undue credence to a theory, forinstance, because you know it was ulti-mately proven true, or otherwise cast-ing historical subjects as having actedfor anachronistic reasons. As anothercolleague would later put it,“It’s hardto avoid, but whenever possible youneed to guard against reading historybackward.”

As Cahan continued:“What couldbe going on here—I’m not saying it islikely but it is possible—is that Bell andGray both depicted their inventions thisway because at the time it was a stan-dard way of doing so.”

Unlikely or not, the thought had notcrossed my mind.

“To avoid any threat of Whiggismcreeping into your analysis, I’d recom-mend scouring through the textbooksof the day to make sure that a picture ofa man’s head leaning over like that wasn’tsome kind of standard way of depictingany number of new inventions.”

Before the week was out, I followedCahan’s suggestion. I flipped throughmany books from the Burndy Library.For all the illustrations I found of elec-trical contraptions, people were hardly,if ever, depicted. Several detailed illus-trations include a disembodied hand

resting on a device, but none depict aperson’s head as Bell and Gray had donein their drawings.

I gradually became more confidentthat Bell and Gray had not appropriat-ed some common form of diagram fromthe period.The more I scrutinized thetwo drawings,the more certain I became

that they were primary documents thatrepresented that rarity: a“smoking gun”that forces us to reevaluate our receivedunderstanding of a historical event. Inthis case, the drawings, now more thana century old, revealed a clear and dis-cernible act of plagiarism—committedby Bell in his private laboratory note-book on the crucial eve of his successwith the telephone.

The deeper I probed, the more Icame to recognize that letters,contemporaneous accounts,and

other primary sources offer powerfulglimpses of past events, but paint a pic-ture that is almost always incomplete.Bell’s archive at the U.S. Library ofCongress includes 147,000 documents—many of which are his voluminouspersonal correspondence. Yet despitethe size of this trove of information, ifBell and his team had made a con-certed effort to steal Gray’s telephonedesign and falsely claim credit for itsinvention, they probably would nothave written explicitly to one another

about the plan.And if by some chancethey did, they would have beenunlikely to retain the record of suchcorrespondence.

How could I hope to overcomethat obstacle?

“It is not an easy job,”my friend andcolleague ConeveryValencius counseledwhen I took up the issue with her.“Butcontext is very important. You haveto educate yourself enough to havethe confidence to contextualize. Forinstance, in your case, it is valuable toknow something about 19th-centuryletters, like the fact that, relative totoday, there was tremendous circum-spection and decorum in the way peo-ple expressed emotion.”

Valencius’ office at the DibnerInstitute stood just down the hall frommine.Trained at Stanford and Harvard,she is an extraordinary historian who, inour small, rarefied group of researchers,often seemed to be the life of a verysedate party. As I tried to make senseof the information I had found so farabout Bell, I arranged to meetValencius in her office to get her adviceabout how historians move from con-jecture to proof in their interpretationsof historical events.

“Well, I guess what I’d say is thatreading carefully is the main job of ahistorian,”Valencius began.“And partof that means educating your ownhistorical intuition so when you comeacross something unusual you can feelconfident to say,‘This document or let-ter or journal entry seems different.’

“Sometimes when you consider analternative interpretation for a histor-ical event, a lot of disparate pieces thatnever held together well seem to fallmore neatly into place,” Valenciusobserved.“That said, though, as a his-torian you have to stick with and betrue to your primary sources.They areyour evidentiary core.”

“In Bell’s case,” I told her, “I keepcoming back to that incriminating

The drawingsrevealed a clearand discernibleact of plagiarism—committed by Bell inhis private laboratorynotebook on thecrucial eve of hissuccess with thetelephone.


sketch in his notebook.Bell must haveseen Gray’s confidential patent filingduring his trip to Washington at theend of February 1876,” I said. “Buthow can I prove it?”

Valencius mused on the question foramoment and then peered atme,smiling.

“It seems like you’re really askingtwo questions,” she said.“On a practicallevel, it seems to me the key questionyou’ve laid out is about patents. If itwere me, I’d probably start with theofficial documents and surviving sup-porting material about the patentingprocess itself.” But, she said, thereseemed to be a bigger question in playas well.“My students often come to meand ask, ‘Who am I to challenge thereceived wisdom about a historicalevent?’” she said.“So I’ll tell you whatI tell them: ‘That’s your job. It’s a bigpart of your job as a historian to inter-rogate your material and to trust yourinformed judgment about it.’ It soundsto me like a part of your question isasking about your own authority here,and I would say you just have to believein that and investigate this thing as

honestly and thoroughly as you can.”Ultimately,with help from colleagues

like Cahan andValencius, I managed topiece together far more about Bell’sstory than I could ever have imaginedpossible at first. I found evidence thatBell’s patent was filed under highlyirregular circumstances and that itsoriginal version had suspicious addi-tions written into the margin that werenever fully explained. I documented theway Bell withheld from the public—and from Gray—the truth about hispath to the telephone,with actions thatare all but inexplicable except as a skill-ful effort to cover his tracks so that Graywouldn’t realize what Bell had done.And my research even led me to theconfession of an official at the U.S.Patent Office who claimed to have facil-itated Bell’s plagiarism and awarded himan airtight patent on an invention Bellhad not, at the time, properly reducedto practice.

I unearthed enough information toraise serious doubts about Bell as thesole inventor of the telephone.And yet,over a century later, this is largely how

he is remembered.The image of Bellas the smiling, portly, white-haired“father of the telephone” lives ontoday in science textbooks, children’sstories, and scholarly works alike.

In the end,perhaps the most impor-tant failing is not Bell’s, but our own.Bell’s notebook aside, the most strik-ing thing about the whole case is howmuch was uncovered about it even inBell’s day. Gray knew many of thedetails himself, and he concluded thatBell had stolen his design. And, inthe intervening years, various capablepeople have reviewed the evidence andreached a similar conclusion.And yet,none of these past efforts has evermanaged to do much to pierce theseemingly invincible myth that Bellsingle-handedly invented the telephone.For many years, even after Bell’s deathin 1922, this myth was skillfully nurturedand promoted by a monopoly whoseinterests it served.

My experience unearthing the factsabout this particular historical intriguetaught me that history is messy, anddelving deeper doesn’t necessarily makeit come much clearer.We can pin downmany of the details of what happenedin the past,but it is up to us what lessonswe take away.Still, if I learned anythingfrom my research, it is that history needsto be challenged and interrogated.Todo anything less is to play a game of“telephone,” tacitly accepting the gar-bled story that is whispered from onegeneration to the next. �

Seth Shulman was the first science-writer-in-residence at the Dibner Institute. He is theauthor of five books, including the recentlypublished Telephone Gambit: ChasingAlexander Graham Bell’s Secret.

This article has been adapted from the book with the per-mission of the publisher,W. W. Norton & Co. ©2008by Seth Shulman.

Seth Shulman, earlier this year at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Mass., with the museum’s replica ofthe liquid transmitter Bell used to call Watson on March 10, 1876. Photo by Jodi Hilton.

Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray did not set out toinvent the telephone. Both were looking for ways to improvethe telegraph, Samuel Morse’s invention of 1844 that couldn’tsend or receive more than one message at a time. AlthoughBell crossed wires with Gray in his efforts to transmit multiplemessages simultaneously, other pairs of scientists have madesimilar discoveries independently. Charles Darwin and AlfredWallace, for example, each came up with a theory of evolutionwithout knowledge of the other’s work.

More often than not, scientists acknowledge previous inves-tigations while offering new theories or formulations. In the 15thand 16th centuries, astronomers ran circles around each otheras they attempted to prove the Earth’s position in the universe.Although Johannes Kepler studied under Danish astronomerTycho Brahe, he preferred Copernicus’s Sun-centered modelof the universe to his mentor’s Earth-centered theory. In his

Astronomia nova (1609), Kepler moved beyond his predecessors,including Ptolemy, by claiming that planets rotated in ellipticalorbits around the Sun rather than in perfect circles. The book isone of the many great works found in the Burndy Library, whichwas housed with the Dibner Institute at MIT when Seth Shulmanconducted his research there in 2004.

“I couldn’t have come to a better place for this kind of work,”Shulman explains. “In the office next to mine, Cesare Maffioli,a genial Italian, was studying Leonardo da Vinci’s uncanny graspof hydrodynamics. Peter Bokulich, a younger colleague on thefloor below with expertise in both physics and history, was inves-tigating how one particular scientific article—known as the Bohr-Rosenfeld paper—influenced the emergence of the field ofquantum mechanics.”

Since Shulman’s productive year in Cambridge, the axis forresearch in the history of science has shifted to the west. In 2006,The Huntington acquired the 67,000-volume Burndy Library, anextensive collection with a particular emphasis on 18th-centuryphysics, including works by and about Isaac Newton, as well asmajor collections in 18th- and 19th-century mathematics, thehistory of electricity, civil and structural engineering, and opticsand color theory. Amassed over a lifetime by inventor andindustrialist Bern Dibner (1897–1988), the library was placedwith the institute in 1993 by Dibner’s son and daughter-in-law,David and Frances Dibner. It fulfilled Bern’s dream to situatescholars in close proximity to their resource materials. When thehosting arrangement with MIT was nearing its end, the Dibnersdonated the library to The Huntington.

Combined with The Huntington’s rich materials, the collec-tion becomes one of the most extensive in the history of scienceand technology in the world. Along with the gift of the BurndyLibrary comes $11.6 million in support for managing the col-lections and related research activities. The Dibner Hall of theHistory of Science, Medicine, and Technology will open thisNovember at The Huntington and will feature displays in thesubjects of astronomy, natural history, medicine, and light. TheDibner History of Science Program will fund long- and short-term fellowships, an annual conference, a lecture series, andan ongoing seminar.

The type of setting described by Shulman has long existedat The Huntington for scholars from various disciplines in thehumanities. It is now the place to be for historians of science.

—Matt Stevens


Center of the Universe

Johannes Kepler’s Astronomia nova (1609) includes planetary models fromCopernicus, Ptolemy, and Tycho Brahe.


In PrintWAR IN ENGLAND, 1642–1649

Barbara DonaganOxford University Press, 2008

While Donagan discusses the similarities anddifferences of Royalists and Parliamentarians,

she also describes how people lived through the Englishcivil war—from the conditions for soldiers to the travailsof civilians. Her case histories of two sieges demonstratethe integration of military and civilian experience, illumi-nating the human cost of war and its effects on society.

THE JEWEL HOUSE: ELIZABETHAN LONDON AND

THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

Deborah E. HarknessYale University Press, 2007

While Francis Bacon has been widely regard-ed as the father of modern science, scores of his Londoncontemporaries also deserve a share in this distinction. Itwas their collaborative, yet often contentious, ethos thathelped to develop the ideals of modern scientific research.Harkness examines six episodes of scientific inquiry anddispute in 16th-century London, when medieval philosophygave way to the empirical, experimental culture that becamea hallmark of the Scientific Revolution.

HISTORICAL ATLAS OF CALIFORNIA

Derek HayesUniversity of California Press, 2007

Using nearly 500 historical maps and manyother illustrations—from rough sketches

drawn in the field to commercial maps—Hayes covers 500years of history. Embellished with Hayes’ text, the mapsshow the transformation of the state from before Europeancontact through the Gold Rush and up to the present.Thebook includes many rare maps from the Library of Congress,the University of California’s Bancroft Library, and theHuntington Library.

Correction: In the fall/winter 2007 issue, we misstated the role of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute in the publication of The AtlanticWorld andVirginia, 1550–1624 and the conference of the same title.Althoughinstitute director Peter Mancall edited the collection of articles, the institute did notsponsor the publication or conference. Co-sponsors of the conference included theCollege ofWilliam and Mary, the ColonialWilliamsburg Foundation, the GilderLehrman Institute of American History, the Reed Foundation, and theVirginiaFoundation for the Humanities.

POSTSCRIPT

Jared Farmer wrote about California’s euca-lyptus trees in the spring/summer 2007 issueof Huntington Frontiers. His latest work, OnZion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and theAmerican Landscape (Harvard University Press,2008), is about Utah’s Mt.Timpanogos.

Shrouded in Indian lore, it now beckons the urban popu-lace of Utah.And yet, no legend graced the mountain untilMormon settlers conjured it in the mid-19th century, afterrenaming the place Zion. Farmer shows how the Mormonscreated their homeland at the expense of the local Indians—and how they expressed their sense of belonging byinvesting the mountain with Indian meaning.

In the fall/winter 2007 issue, Daniel P.Gregory wrote about Maynard L. Parker’sphotographs of ranch houses designed byCliff May. Gregory has just published CliffMay and the Modern Ranch House (Rizzoli,2008), with a contribution by Joel Silver and

photographs by Joe Fletcher.The volume also contains manyParker photos from the Huntington archive. May’s influen-tial designs managed to be both modern and traditional,celebrating a casually elegant, indoor-outdoor lifestyle, anddrew inspiration from California’s ranchos while embracingthe latest technological gadgetry.

FRENCH ART OF THE

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY AT

THE HUNTINGTON

Edited by Shelley M. Bennettand Carolyn SargentsonHuntington Library andYale

University Press, 2008

In our cover feature, Kimberly Chrisman-Campbelldescribes just two of the nearly 300 artworkscataloged in this new book co-edited by ShelleyBennett, former Huntington curator of British andEuropean art.The catalog combines curatorialentries and essays with detailed technical studies ofpaintings, textiles, furniture, porcelain, gold boxes,gilt bronzes, and sculpture. It represents a five-yearcollaboration with no fewer than 20 specialistcontributors, as well as many more researchers,preparators, and photographers working behindthe scenes.An introductory essay by Bennett exam-ines the formation of the collection in the contextof the Huntingtons’ personal lives as well as thebroader history of artistic patronage in America.

WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT:

THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICA,

1815–1848

Daniel Walker HoweOxford University Press, 2007

Last fall, Daniel Walker Howe talked up his new book at twoHuntington events. The first was a small seminar with about adozen historians who debated the finer points of Howe’s volumeof American history covering the period between the Battle ofNew Orleans and the Mexican War. While the era might lackthe obvious cohesiveness of the ages of Revolution and CivilWar, it has compelling storylines featuring Andrew Jackson,abolitionism, the rise of party politics, and the development ofrailroads and westward expansion, to name just a few.

Several weeks later, Howe gave a public lecture, where hedecoded his book title, taken from a passage of scripture thatSamuel Morse tapped out in 1844 in the first telegraph mes-sage. With one phrase, Howe evoked the impact of technologyand the influence of religion. The telegraph, he said, changed theway Americans traded goods, read newspapers, and perceiveddemocracy. Religion, too, had a transformative power. In 2003,when he was the R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow at TheHuntington, Howe had given another public lecture here,

speaking specifically about the role of reli-gion in public education.

While the 900-page book is certainlythe product of decades of research inarchives, including the Huntington Library,it is also the result of Howe’s attempt tocombine rigorous scholarship for academicconsumption with engaging narrative forlay readers.

“I had always written monographs for other historians orthe captive audiences in their classes,” Howe divulged at theseminar, distinguishing this book from past projects. “So writingfor a curious, literate public was a new and exciting experience.”

Howe is Rhodes Professor of American History Emeritus atOxford University and professor of history emeritus at UCLA.He has been coming to The Huntington since 1976, when heconducted research for one of his early monographs, ThePolitical Culture of the American Whigs (1980). While somehistorians might describe antebellum America as the age ofJackson, Howe sees it as the age of the Whigs—the party ofJohn Quincy Adams and the young Abraham Lincoln. Heapproaches the Huntington collections with a discriminating eye.“One periodical—the Niles’ Register out of Baltimore—is awonderful source for American history in general,” he says. “Ithas a Whig point of view that makes it especially valuable formy research.” Also useful have been antislavery tracts, diplo-matic correspondence, and various sources on the Gold Rushand fur trade.

But if Howe had to highlight just one Huntington resource,it might be the transformative effect of communication. “I’m aperson who values conversation very highly,” he explains.“One of the reasons I have loved The Huntington is that it’s aplace where you get such good conversation.”

BA

CK

FLAP

Daniel Walker Howe (center) chats with Huntingtonresearchers Richard Lyman Bushman and Ronald C.White Jr. Bushman is author, most recently, of JosephSmith: Rough Stone Rolling (Knopf, 2005). White haspublished The Eloquent President: Portrait of Lincolnthrough His Words (Random House, 2005) and isworking on another book about Lincoln.

PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORYThis April, Daniel Walker Howe received the Pulitzer Prize in History for What Hath God Wrought. The book is the sixth to appear inthe Oxford University Press series on the history of the United States; it is also the third in the series to win the Pulitzer. It helps bridgethe eras covered in Robert Middlekauff’s The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789 (1982) and James M.McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom: The Era of the Civil War (1988). Middlekauff, former Huntington director, received theBancroft Prize for his book; McPherson, the R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington in 1995–96, won the Pulitzer Prize.

On the CoverDiana (front cover) and Madame de Vermenoux(right) are the handiworks of French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741–1828). One a life-sizebronze, the other a marble bust, they came toThe Huntington in 1927 as part of the ArabellaD. Huntington Memorial Art Collection. Nowoccupying space in the recently renovated andreopened Huntington Art Gallery, both are de-tailed in the new catalog French Art of theEighteenth Century at The Huntington, whichincludes comprehensive sections on sculptures,paintings, porcelain, textiles, and furniture. In thisissue, we examine how we know what we know aboutthese two works, exquisite examples of Houdon’smastery of the art.

Photos by John Sullivan

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