USA > Connecticut > Connecticut as a colony and as a state; or, One of the original thirteen, Volume IV > Part 20
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brought him cordial interest and the acquintance of such men as Carlyle, the Lake Poets, Lord Brougham, and others. He brought home many valuable ideas about educational and municipal systems, which his gifts of oratory enabled him to present to the public in a very convincing manner. Moreover, he pleaded successfully for broader views in caring for the insane and for criminals. However, his most important achievement at that period was in securing, in 1838, the pas- sage of a bill in the General Assembly for the better local supervision of schools. This bill provided for a Board of School Commissioners for the State, and of that Board Mr. Barnard was secretary for four years. He had found his life-work; and in the fulness of his zeal, he traveled over the country to elevate public sentiment, speaking in every State in the Union but Texas, addressing ten Legislatures, and so infusing the general public with his enthusiasm as to give a lasting uplift to public instruction. The establish- ment of the Normal School in New Britain was a direct result. His assistance was invoked by Rhode Island, where in 1843 he served as Superintendent of Schools, filling the same office later in Connecticut from 1850 to 1854. He was called to the University of Wisconsin as its Chancellor, and after the war, to St. John's College, at Annapolis, as its president. He was the first U. S. Commissioner of Education, and in his first report he anticipated almost every measure of reform in education that was afterwards adopted in the United States. He established the first system of State libraries, and for the first time organized teachers in a national association.
By his writings, fifty-two volumes in all, he made a pro- found impression on the educational public, 30,000 copies of his "Educational Development in the United States" being sold; while the Journal of Education, which he began in
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1855, is called by the Encyclopedia Britannica "by far the most valuable work in our language on the history of educa- tion." Mr. Barnard was generous to a fault: of his own for- tune, he spent $40,000 on educational tracts to be scattered. His success was owing not only to his great ability and extremely gracious and winning nature, but to his wisdom, which restrained him from visionary enterprises, and induced general public confidence in all that he suggested. His great pioneer work was appreciated at home and abroad. His eighty-sixth birthday, January 25, 1897, was made the occa- sion of a memorial and congratulatory celebration in Hart- ford, in which the teachers and Legislatures of the State united with friends from far and near to honor the patriarch of educational development, who was present in health and vigor.
Following in his footsteps came Birdsey Grant Northrup, born in Kent in 1817, and of the class of 1841 at Yale, whose efforts to promote education in the State and the world deserve lasting recognition, although he did not sway men as did Henry Barnard. He was president of the National Education Association, and of the American Institute of Instruction; but will be longest remembered as the "Father of Village Improvement Societies," the originator of "Arbor Day," and for his connection with the American education of Japanese and Chinese youth. He declined an offer from the Government of Japan to establish a system of public education; and in 1895 he was received there as the guest of the Japanese nation.
Of Connecticut birth, too, is William T. Harris, who has combined the profundity of a member of the Concord School of Philosophy with the practical merits of a successful United States Commissioner of Education. He founded the Phil-
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osophical Society, and the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, both of St. Louis, has written important philosophical works, and has several times represented the Bureau of Education abroad.
All the religious world knows the story of Samuel J. Mills a native of Torringford, one of the four Williams students under a haystack who set rolling the ball of the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions; and of his devotion to the elevation of the colored race, here and in Africa, ending in his death at sea on the passage from Sierra Leone: and in harmony with his labors were those of Ralph Randolph Gurley, born in Lebanon, who four years after his graduation from Yale in 1818, became the agent and secre- tary of the American Colonization Society, increasing its revenue in ten years from $800 to $40,000, and being espe- cially active in founding Liberia.
No man was ever more thoroughly imbued with the desire to do good to his fellow-men than New Britain's famous son, Elihu Burritt. From his brother Elijah-a noted teacher, and the author of that long-used book, "The Geography of the Heavens,"-he gained his only regular instruction in a school; and that only for three months in his twenty-first year. But his zeal for learning surmounted all obstacles. Like many boys then, he had been taught a trade, which in his case was that of a worker in all kinds of iron tools,-a blacksmith, in the parlance of the time; and he made the forge support him while studying mathematics and languages. His Algebra or Greek or Latin Grammar set up before him at the forge, he made the blows on the anvil keep time with declensions and conjugations in ancient tongues, or accom- pany complicated mental mathematical operations. Often he forged ten hours a day while studying such languages as
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Portugese, Gaelic, Chaldee, Sanskrit, Hindustani, Icelandic, Basque, or Manx. His philological taste developed a remark- able aptitude for the special acquisition of rare vocabularies, so that at last he could read with more or less ease fifty languages. While he was in Worcester, whither the Anti- quarian Library had attracted him, he wrote the famous let- ter in the archaic Celto-Breton dialect to the Royal Anti- quarian Society of France, now exhibited in the Museum at Rennes as the only letter ever written in that language by an American. Just as he found himself famous, he made a great turn in his life, and philanthropy took the place of philology in his interests. For twenty years he devoted himself to schemes for the benefit of mankind, which have identified him with the philanthropy of the age, and particularly with the movement for arbitration. His Christian Citizen was pub- lished in the interest of peace; and his Olive Leaves in many languages, fluttered over the world. His efforts and acquire- ments brought him into communication with great men on both sides of the water, such as Bright, Cobden, de Tocque- ville, and Victor Hugo.
Beginning in 1846, he made several long visits to Europe, where he besought court and fireside to listen to the message of the "League of Universal Brotherhood." To him we owe the great boon of ocean penny postage, the penny to be added to the land postage; to him starving Ireland owed the ship- load of provisions and clothing sent by the people of Bos- ton; and to him were greatly due the Peace Congresses at Brussels, Paris, London, and elsewhere, where he reached the climax of his efforts. These extraordinary assemblages of the most distinguished philanthropists of two continents, with their brilliant and pathetic appeals for arbitration instead of the sword, made a profound impression on the world; and
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they have borne fruit in the Geneva Tribunal, the High Joint Commission, and the Hague Arbitration Court. At these meetings, Mr. Burritt was received with overwhelming applause, and honors awaited him on his return to his native land.
He spent four happy years as our Consular Agent at Bir- mingham, England, after the Civil War. In the peace of his concluding years in New Britain, he continued his linguis- tic studies, and occupied himself much with beneficent enter- prises, public and private. He wrote much, and well; his published works amounting to thirty volumes, ranging from juvenile books, through travel and religion, to a Sanskrit Handbook. Of them, his "Mission of Great Sufferings" is characteristic of his highest thought. Gentle, refined, cour- teous, and modest beneath his weight of honors, this remark- able man passed away in 1879, equally beloved and admired, and leaving a name that grows constantly brighter as the great apostle of arbitration.
So many rich Connecticut men have made the world brighter by their generous gifts of parks, libraries, museums, and institutions, that selection is baffled. About some indi- vidual benefactions, however, there is special significance. Asa Packer of Groton enriched his adopted State, Pennsyl- vania, by founding Lehigh University and St. Luke's Hos- pital at South Bethlehem, as well as building several churches, endowing the first in 1868 with $2,000,000, a larger sum than had been given then by any one individual to a like object; and Walter Newberry, born in East Windsor, gave $4,000,000 to found the magnificent and well-equipped New- berry Library in Chicago. Joseph Hand, born in Madison and dying in Guilford, had a singular experience during the Civil War. Having gone to the South to look after his busi-
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ness there, he was arrested as a spy in New Orleans, nearly mobbed in Augusta, and allowed to retire to North Carolina on parole during the war. Quite prepared to lose the business interests he had left in Augusta, he was greatly surprised when his partner, Williams, who had carried on the busi- ness successfully during his absence, returned to him, after hostilities had ended, $558,000 as his share of the profits. This unexpected fortune having been invested until, in 1888, it amounted to a million dollars, Mr. Hand gave it to the American Missionary Association to be held in trust for the education of Southern negroes; besides $300,000 for imme- diate use, and $200,000 which accrued to the fund in 1894. This is said to be the "largest gift ever made in this country by a living donor to a benevolent society."
With the same aim was the gift of John Fox Slater, a native of Rhode Island, but identified with Connecticut through a life spent in Norwich, where he amassed a for- tune. He was an authority on railroad matters, and very successful in managing his great cotton-mills, where his seven overseers served terms varying from seventeen to forty- eight years. He gave a million dollars, one-half invested, one-half in cash, to be used by trustees for "the uplifting of the lately emancipated population of the Southern States and their posterity, by conferring on them the blessings of Chris- tian education." He went on to speak of the "compassion that was due in view of their prevailing ignorance, which exists by no fault of their own." Congress passed a resolu- tion of thanks and ordered a gold medal to be struck and pre- sented to him. His son gave to Norwich the valuable Slater Museum.
Among the many beautiful libraries that have been given to towns all over the State, the Blackstone Memorial Library
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at Branford is undoubtedly the most beautiful, and has already cast a certain dignity over the village. This tasteful building, which with its equipment cost three hundred thou- sand dollars, was the gift of the Hon. Timothy B. Black- stone of Chicago, as a memorial to his father, Captain James Blackstone. Five generations of Blackstones have been iden- tified with Branford, all descended from that William Black- stone who was found living on the Charles River when the first settlers came to Boston.
Four of these five munificent givers were born in the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century, and four of them in the same region bordering on the Sound.
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CHAPTER XV IN ARTS AND SCIENCES
C ONNECTICUT is not Athens," was the famous rejoinder of Governor Trumbull to the yearn- ings towards art of his son John; and we must still admit that neither Athens nor Florence has found a reproduction on American soil. Yet the good governor little thought that within a hundred years Connecticut would rank as one of the three pioneers in orig- inal art among the United States, and that in this twentieth century she could count hundreds of citizens who have found art lucrative and honorable. Her record is creditable: she "produced the first, and for years almost all of the standard historical works of the country;" she has had more than her share of National Academicians; she had the first aca- demic art-school in the country; she has sent hundreds of art-students abroad; she has had some artists of acknowl- edged ability; and she has long been a favorite resort for painters.
It is significant of the unbroken art-succession of a century that the easel used by Trumbull, the patriot-painter, and given by him to Jocelyn, has through the heirs of the latter descended to the Yale Art School.
Morse, who was the first president of the National Academy of Design, painted some miniatures even in his college days, and had many New Haven sitters for his later portraits. And Nathaniel Jocelyn, born in New Haven in 1796, and beginning to paint delightful miniatures before he was twenty, was long a patriarch among painters, for his hand did not lose its skill in portraits before his death in 1881. His portraits are still much esteemed for their natural tints, graceful pose, and fidelity to the characteristics of the sub- jects. He did service to history as well as to art, by preserv- ing the countenances of many of the important men of his
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time, with whom he often had an intimate personal acquaint- ance. Such were his portraits of Dr. Jonathan Knight and Dr. Eli Ives. Mr. Jocelyn was public-spirited, led an exemplary life and stimulated general interest in art. He was much interested in the unfortunate captives of the slave- ship Amistad, brought by chance to our shores, and restored to freedom after the long lawsuit in which Roger Baldwin was their able defender. During their stay in New Haven, Jocelyn painted the portrait of Cinque, their leader, which was widely copied.
The name of Flagg has been for generations associated with art in Connecticut in the persons of six descendants of Henry Flagg, a well-known lawyer of South Carolina and New Haven, and five years mayor of the latter place. Mayor Flagg's brother-in-law, Washington Allston, perhaps gave an impulse to the tendency to art in his nephews. Henry, the oldest, divided his time between the navy and painting marine views; but dying during the Civil War while in command of his ship, did not leave any pictures of lasting importance. The father was distressed to find that two more sons, George and Jared, were infected with the same passion for paint; but his remonstrances were of no avail. George, the second son, was considered a prodigy, and tales that seem fabulous are told of his vogue as a portrait-painter at thirteen, in Bos- ton, when he was "the pet of the Bostonians." In particu- lar, every one went to see his portrait of Miss Benjamin. The boy must have received some valuable ideas from All- ston, but he became rather spoiled by adulation. Going to London to pursue his art, he painted there, under the spur of a rebuff from Constable, the "Match-Girl," which won him a reputation. At eighteen he had returned to New Haven to establish a studio; and, living intermittently in
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New Haven, London, and New York, painted portraits which are often pleasing, and historical pieces that have drifted into oblivion. Among his famous sitters was Fanny Kemble.
His younger brother, Jared B. Flagg, was likewise pre- cocious in art, likewise studied with Allston; had painted, when sixteen, a portrait of his father which was exhibited at the National Academy in New York; and had established himself as a portrait-painter in Hartford at the early age of seventeen. It is said that only a week after opening his studio, he received the order for the portrait of Judge Hitch- cock that now hangs in the Alumni Hall at Yale; and soon after, he painted several of the governors. In 1850, he was made a National Academician. In spite of becoming an Episcopal clergyman and officiating for years as the rector of Grace Church in Brooklyn, he could not lay aside the brush entirely, and resumed it in the later years of his life. His most interesting "Life and Letters of Washington Allston" is the standard biography of that painter. His taste was inherited by his sons, Montague, Charles Noel, and Ernest : the first, his own most difficult critic; being a painter of such careful and finished portraits as those of Charles Scribner, and President Pyncheon of Trinity College; the second, a portrait-painter; and the third, the famous architect of St. Luke's Hospital and the new buildings of the Naval Academy at Annapolis. Of the three, only Montague was of Hart- ford birth; but in 1888, Charles Noel Flagg established the Connecticut League of Art Students in Hartford, where he has identified himself with the local art interests and has painted portraits of such men as Charles Dudley Warner, Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens), and an extremely good one of the artist's father.
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Hartford has always been proud of her painter of national renown, Frederick Church, whose "Niagara," "Icebergs," and "Heart of the Andes," "the carnival of summer far and near," as Buchanan Read sang of it, were household favor- ites for years through countless reproductions. Church studied under Thomas Cole, acquired his great reputation before going abroad, and had few of the romantic trials of destitute artists. He did not shrink from depicting Nature in her grandeur, and set himself tasks which would have intimi- dated many artists. In spite of abundant means, he was an indefatigable worker, devoting ten hours a day to his canvas, and going to Labrador to sail among icebergs in a boat, to South America, Syria, Jerusalem, anywhere, where he needed to study his chosen subjects.
Artists were many as the years went on. Oliver Stone and Rossiter studied with Jocelyn; Gurdon Trumbull, Hubbard, Tryon, Allen Talcott, Kensett, the painter of Lake George, might stand as color-bearers for their comrades, and have helped to place painting among the honorable professions; and among those who lived and painted in the State so long as to seem like true sons were Bellows, Shattuck, Shurtleff, Robbins, Twachtman; and James and William Hart. The exquisite paintings of the Harts have perpetuated the charms of Farmington on many New York walls.
The sculptor is a rarer bird than the painter, and there were few to encourage the timid efforts of the first Connec- ticut artist in stone, Hezekiah Augur, a New Haven youth whose disappointments were many, whose talent was undeni- able. It is pleasant to know that Yale made him an hon- orary alumnus in recognition of his character and ability. Chauncey B. Ives, a native of Hamden, spent most of his life in Italy, whence he sent home many statues, and the fine
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bust of that New Haven architect of lofty taste and aims, Ithiel Towne, which is in the Yale Art School.
Church lived in the sunshine of prosperity; the friend of his boyhood and manhood, Edward Bartholomew, was tossed between hope and bitter disappointment until his early death. He was born in Colchester in 1822, but spent his youth in Hartford, where he struggled with the occupa- tions of bookbinding and dentistry, since no one interested himself in the possibilities for art in the shy and shrinking boy, with his high temper and tender conscience. From read- ing the life of Benvenuto Cellini, and heartfelt talks with his favorite companion, Church, he fed his desires to be an artist ; and at last, while the curator of the Wadsworth Atheneum, he essayed to paint a large picture. From childhood, he had handled the pencil and the brush; but now, in the midst of his enthusiasm, he discovered that red and green were alike to him, that he was color-blind! In one wild moment of despair, he drew his brush across the picture, which he kicked, with all its appurtenances of brush, palette, and easel into the corner, there to lie with his ruined aspirations. But hope recalled his fondness for modeling; and in secrecy he began to carve a bust of Mrs. Sigourney, a file and furni- ture-hammer being his only tools, and his marble unsuited for the task. Thus engaged, he was found by James G. Bat- terson, that lover of art and friend of artists, who at once provided him with the proper marble and tools, and thus brought before the world a sculptor who was to be famous.
Just as Bartholomew's rising reputation warranted him in taking a studio in New York, the dishonesty of a washer- woman made him the victim of small-pox. The tall, stalwart man, stricken in the beauty and vigor of youth, arose from
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his bed with health permanently impaired, lame for life and obliged to go on crutches.
Still undaunted, he started for Rome, overcoming many physical obstacles on account of his infirmities, and there his genius expanded rapidly. Within a week after his arrival, he was at work on the group "Homer led by his Daughter." Travel in Greece and the East, the instruction and counsel of artists, the encouragement of a brilliant reputation, and crowded orders, all were his in dazzling combination. Twice he returned to Hartford, where he was received with the greatest compliments; the city, on one occasion, giving a grand dinner in honor of him and his brother artist, Church. In the midst of this success, while promise was becoming performance, and he was working twelve hours a day; when fortune seemed ready to atone for a gloomy past, death ended all, and at thirty-six his career was done. "Eve Repent- ant," his most famous work, full of grace and feeling, is in Philadelphia, where it had been ordered by Mr. Joseph Har- rison. Friends in Hartford, through Mr. Batterson, who hastened to Rome on hearing the sad news, gathered such works of the sculptor as are now treasured in the Wadsworth Atheneum. The original models for the bas-reliefs on the pedestal of the Eve are owned by the Yale Art School; and a copy of the statue itself, not quite equal to the original which had been finished under the master's eye, was made for the Atheneum collection.
Bartholomew had a fine perception of the dominating motives in a work of art, and indefatigable enthusiasm in the conscientious development of those ideas. Great sculp- tors are very rare; and the world could ill afford to lose him in mid-career. Trumbull, Bartholomew, and Church are the
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three Connecticut artists who may be rightly called geniuses. In them the divine spark was unquenchable.
Paul Bartlett, the sculptor of the "Bear Tamer," of the "Lafayette" given by the school children of the United States to France and placed in the Square of the Louvre, of "Columbus" and "Michel-Angelo" in the Congressional Library, was a New Haven boy, and showed his talent in childhood. His bust of his grandfather was exhibited in the Salon when he was fourteen, and in the next year he entered L'Ecole des Beaux Arts. His statues of General McClellan in Philadelphia, and General Warren in Roxbury, besides his works in the Luxembourg and the Museums in Boston, Phil- adelphia, Chicago, and Paris, have brought him much honor, which is reflected on his native State.
Hartford and New Haven have been centres of art-influ- ence for years to a limited extent. Weir, the painter of the "Forging of the Shaft," and the sculptor of the statue of the elder Silliman; and Niemeyer, the painter of "Gutenberg printing from his First Type," have been frequent exhibitors in New York and the great expositions, and under their schol- arly instruction the Yale Art School has sent out graduates who have won distinction at home and abroad. In recent summers, a third group of artists has been established in Lyme, that historic town with its fine old mansions, aristo- cratic traditions, and charm of river, country, and Sound. It has attracted artists of various nationalities, men from Eng- land and Canada, and different parts of the United States; and under the Art League of New York a Summer School of Landscape Artists has been established. Many students resort to it; and the presence of such artists as Henry W. Ran- ger, Will Howe, Will Howe Foote, DuMond, Hemming, Cohen, Dawson, Allen Talcott, Clark Voorhees, and Childe
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Hassam, who have had annual exhibitions in the town, has given to it the name of the "American Barbizon."
In the realm of histrionic art, William Gillette has won name and fame in the double capacity of actor and play- wright. In the science or art, whichever it be called, of lexicography, Yale University has ever led, as is attested by Webster's Dictionary with its numerous editions, and the Cen- tury Dictionary.
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