christine laidlaw - painting with silken threads

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Painting with Silken Threads: Fanny Dixwell Holmes and Japanism in Nineteenth-CenturyBoston Author(s): CHRISTINE W. LAIDLAW Source: Studies in the Decorative Arts, Vol. 10, No. 2 (SPRING-SUMMER 2003), pp. 42-68Published by: on behalf of the The University of Chicago Press Bard Graduate CenterStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40663045Accessed: 26-02-2015 23:47 UTC

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CHRISTINE W. LAIDLAW Painting with Silken Threads: Fanny Dixwell Holmes and Japanism in Nineteenth-Century Boston

Fanny Dixwell Holmes (1841 '1929; Fig. 1) created highly original land-

scape embroideries that were an important part of early Japanism in Boston. With their mixture of American and Japanese elements, these innovative works won great praise during the 1870s and early 1880s. Critics marveled at Holmes's poetic landscapes and hailed her as a leader in the revival of embroidery in the United States. The painter William Morris Hunt said she was "the only really creative artist beside himself in America."1 Her works even impressed Oscar Wilde, who called her "that

Penelope of New England whose silken pictures I found so beautiful."2

Today, Fanny Holmes's works have been forgotten, and if she is remembered at all, it is as the wife of the Supreme Court justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935; Fig. 2). This neglect is another feature that makes her career typical of the early period of Japanism in Boston, which also has been largely overlooked. Part of her current obscurity was her own doing, since she destroyed many of her own works.3 As a result, although a few contemporary illustrations exist (Figs. 5-7, 9, 11), only one embroidery is known to have survived (Figs. 13-14). These works, combined with enthusiastic descriptions by critics of about fifteen of her embroideries, are left to suggest the nature of her achievement.

A Brief Biography

Fanny Bowditch Dixwell was born in Cambridge in 1841, the oldest of six children. Both she and Wendell Holmes (as he was called) belonged to the intellectual aristocracy of Boston. Fanny's mother, Mary Ingersoll Bowditch Dixwell, was a daughter of Nathaniel Bowditch, a mathematician and astronomer who was world-famous as the author of The New American Practical Navigator, published in 1802.4 Her father, Epes Sargent Dixwell, was an enthusiastic teacher of Latin and Greek who ran a small private school for boys in Boston.

The Holmes family was better known than the Dixwells. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was a physician, a professor at Harvard, and a

Christine W. Laidlaw is an independent art historian living in Montclair, N.J.

42 Studies in the Decorative Arts/Spring-Summer 2003


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Fanny Dixwell Holmes and Japanism 43

popular author. Dr. Holmes coined the term "Boston Brahmin" in 1860 to describe the intellectual class of Boston in general, and a fictional version of Wendell in particular.5 In so doing, he compared them to the

highest class of the Hindu caste system - the priestly elite. The rapidity with which the term was adopted shows Boston's interest in the East, as well as Dr. Holmes's central position in the city.

Much of Fanny's life escaped public notice, and almost nothing is known about her childhood or education. Her younger sister Susan attended a Miss Bowen's Sewing School, and presumably Fanny received similar training.6 On the other hand, Wendell's education is well documented. He went to Dixwell's school for six years and then to Harvard. After serving as an officer in the Civil War for three years, Wendell entered Harvard Law School in 1864.

The Dixwells lived near Harvard, and Wendell visited them fre-

quently. Wendell admired his former teacher greatly, and he and Fanny were close friends. She was shy and retiring, but when she was at ease, she was warm, charming, intelligent, and witty. One friend reported that

Fanny and Wendell shared "a lively humor" and that her rapier wit "was as flexible and flashing as her husband's."7 Many years later, when President Theodore Roosevelt asked her how she liked Washington, she

replied, "Washington is full of famous men and the women they married when they were young."8

Wendell and Fanny also shared a love of art. He had bought a set of

etching tools while he was still at Dixwell's school. When he was at

Harvard, he wrote an article about Albrecht Drer and another about the

Pre-Raphaelites.9 Throughout his life, he collected Old Master prints and at his death he would leave his collection of Drers, Rembrandts, Van

Dycks, and Whistlers to the Library of Congress. In the mid- to late 1860s, Fanny and Wendell were part of a small

group of friends. Wendell, William James, and others met frequently in the evening to discuss the universe, science, and philosophy. "Twisting the tail of the Cosmos," they called it.10 Later, the historian Henry Adams joined the group. Among their other friends were Marian

Hooper, better known as Clover, and William James's cousin Minny Temple.

The few mentions of Fanny in the late 1860s are mostly in letters to or from William and Henry James. William met Fanny in March 1866 and wrote that she was "about as fine as they make 'em. That villain Wendell Holmes has been keeping her all to himself out at Cambridge for the last eight years; but I hope I may enjoy her acquaintance now."11




FIGURE 1

Fanny Bowditch Dixwell Holmes (1840- 1929), c. 1870. Photo: Harvard Law Art Collection.

Elsewhere he said, "She is decidedly A- 1 and (so far) the best girl I have known."12

In December 1867 Wendell wrote William that Fanny had suffered eye problems for some time, which was a grave disappointment "as she was expecting to go into painting in good earnest. But she said yesterday that they were nearly well and that she thought she might begin her lessons before long - I wish she may - if only for her sake to find a voice for something within her."13 A few months later, Wendell informed William that "Fanny DixwelPs eyes have given her but little pain since I last wrote though she has to be careful in their use."14

By 1869 Fanny was embroidering seriously. In November, Minny Temple reported to Henry James, "She gave me one of her embroideries, a good one representing night and morning. This mark of favor aroused Willy Qames]'s jealousy - he said she meant it for him, and would fain have taken it from me, but I brought it off triumphantly."15 Minny's account shows both that Fanny was creating landscape embroideries by 1869, and that they were so good that both William and Minny wanted one. In another letter, Minny called one piece "an extraordinary pro- duction for a young woman of the 19th Century, very beautiful in the workmanship, original in the design."16

A month later William also praised Fanny's work, saying that she "has been publishing, so to speak, her embroidery, and I find her fame has spread among people who know nothing of her personally."17 He added, "I hope this will stimulate her to work - for such a talent or rather genius as she has for that particular branch of art, ought not simply to smoulder through her private existence and that of her few intimate friends." William was an astute critic. He had studied painting with William Morris Hunt, and knew whereof he spoke. Fanny's friends obviously agreed that her work was remarkable, since they said she was "creating a new art."18

Fanny Dixwell married Wendell Holmes on June 17, 1872. Shortly after the wedding, she came down with rheumatic fever and was ill for several months.19 While she was still confined to her room, the painter and stained-glass artist John La Farge showed William James seven drawings for a book he was illustrating, the Songs from the Od Dramatists, "to which he had a pretty poor cover in his pocket designed by Fanny Holmes."20 Usually she got better notices than that. Incidentally, James's remark proves that Fanny and La Farge knew each other.

In 1873 the Holmeses bought a summer house in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, on Buzzards Bay, where they went sailing with Wendell's




law partner George O. Shattuck.21 The house looked out over the beach to Mattapoisett harbor on the west and Buzzards Bay on the south. Many of Fanny's embroideries would depict the land and sea near Mattapoisett (Fig. 13). When William James visited them a couple of years later, he wrote, "I fell quite in love with she [sic]; & ... he looked like [Franois] Millet's peasant figures as he stooped over his little plants."22 William also said, "the lonesomeness of the shore, which . . . makes every object rock or shrub stand out so vividly, seemed also to put him and his wife under a sort of lens."

Wendell's first book was published in the fall of 1873. This was a

major re-editing of James Kent's Commentaries on American Law. Fanny helped with the final stages of the book. Mary James (William and

Henry's mother) reported to Henry that Fanny had read the proofs and "talked with great interest about it, and of all the labor it cost them, and what a relief it was to them to have it off their hands."23

The Holmeses visited England in the spring and summer of 1874- Fanny kept a journal of the trip, her only writing of any length to survive.24 In London they went to see James Abbott McNeill Whistler's first one-man exhibition, at the Flemish Gallery, Pall Mall. Fanny admired Whistler's decoration, noting that the gallery was "beautifully got up with a pretty red and yellow straw matting [on the floor], pale pink walls, blue vases and bowls with pink and yellow flowers."25 She particularly liked Whistler's portrait of Frederick R. Leyland and wished that he could paint Wendell.

She also found two seascapes "worth remembering." Her descriptions suggest that these were Nocturne: Blue and Gold - Southampton Water, now in the Art Institute of Chicago, and Symphony in Grey and Green: The Ocean, in the Frick Collection in New York (Fig. 3). The latter has several Japanese elements reminiscent of Hiroshige prints (Fig. 4), such as the cropping of structures at the sides, the silhouetted branches at the bottom, and the subtle shadings of color, all elements that also found their way into Fanny's embroideries. Later that same day, the Holmeses went to the National Gallery, where the Turners "enchanted" her.26 Her embroideries would show the influence of Whistler's subtle shading and Turner's brilliant skies.

On another morning one of Henry Adams's friends, Emily Otter Strutt, Lady Belper, took Fanny to see the exhibition at the Royal School of Art Needlework (also called the South Kensington School, from its location). The curriculum and the artistic style were inspired by the work of William Morris, who had revived medieval embroidery techniques. Fanny admired a screen made for the Princess Royal with a Japanese-

FIGURE 2 Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935), 1872. Photo: Harvard Law Art Collection.




inspired design and she sketched one panel with color notations.27 This was not Fanny's first encounter with Japanese design. In fact, she and Wendell shared the growing interest in Japanese art in Boston in the 1860s and 1870s.

FIGURE 3

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Symphony in Grey and Green: The Ocean, 1866. Oil on canvas, 80.7 X 113 cm. Frick

Collection, New York.

FIGURE 4

Hiroshige, Sudden Shower at Shono, from the series Fifty^three Stations of the Tokaido, 1833. Woodblock print, 22.7 X 34.8 cm.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.




Japanism in Boston

One factor underlying the appreciation of Japanese art in Boston was a long familiarity with Oriental goods, which filled the houses of those involved in the China trade. It is surely more than coincidence that several of the early admirers of Japanese art were descended from men who had sailed in the Far East - among them Fanny and Clover

Hooper.28 Fanny's grandfather Nathaniel Bowditch of Salem sailed to the Far East three times, twice to Manila, and once to Sumatra.29 In 1799 he was in Batavia (now Jakarta), when the first Massachusetts ship to trade with Japan entered the harbor. She was the Franklin, captained by James De vreux of Salem, returning from Nagasaki. De vreux brought Japanese prints and Japanese goods home to Salem30 over fifty years before Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry established diplomatic re- lations with that reclusive nation.

In the 1860s Japanese prints started coming to Boston in greater numbers. John La Farge and William Morris Hunt were among the first admirers of Japanese art. La Farge had discovered Japanese art in Europe in the late 1850s. He went to Newport in 1859 to study art with Hunt, taking his enthusiasm for Japanese art with him. In the next few years, La

Farge imported hundreds of Japanese prints, among them a copy of

Hiroshige's Sudden Shower at Shono (Fig. 4)-31 Hunt also owned Japanese prints.32 In 1862 he moved to Boston to be near his patrons, and La Farge followed in 1864.

The Holmeses were connected to the circle of early admirers of

Japanese art. Wendell's mother, Amelia, was a second cousin of the architect Edward Clarke Cabot, who is said to have owned the first illustrated Japanese book in Boston.33 Another one of Cabot's cousins, Louisa Dumaresq Perkins, was Hunt's wife. Hunt, La Farge, Elihu Vedder, and others met in Cabot's room in the Studio Building to discuss

Japanese art in the mid- 1860s. Although Winslow Homer was not mentioned in this account, he too was a member of this circle. He was a close friend of La Farge and was strongly influenced by Hunt.34

By the early 1870s, an amazing number of Japanese prints were available in this country. The New York critic Russell Sturgis claimed to have seen over three thousand by 1868.35 In addition, Japanese fans were

selling in the millions. In 1873 Noah Brooks noted in Scribners Monthly that one ship alone had brought a million fans to San Francisco, and

pointed out that many millions more were in use between Maine and Florida.36




This interest in Japanese goods was shared by the Holmeses and their friends. For example, Dr. and Mrs. Holmes gave Wendell a Japanese lacquer glove box as a Christmas present in 1866.37 In the 1870s, Henry and Clover Adams began to collect Japanese bronzes, textiles, and ceramics. Clover bought Japanese bronzes in Paris on her wedding trip and compared them to those she had seen for sale at Richard Briggs's shop in Boston before she left for Europe in 1872.38

From the 1860s on, Bostonians went to Japan. Fanny and Wendell knew Charles Appleton Longfellow, a son of the poet Henry Wadsworth

Longfellow, who was in Japan from 1871 to 1873. Charles wrote his sisters long descriptive letters about what he did and saw there. Since letters of this sort were commonly shared with family and friends, Charles's sisters surely read some of his letters to the Dixwells, both before and after Fanny married and left home.39 Similarly, Charles's sisters wrote to him in Japan about Fanny and Wendell's engagement and

marriage.40 The Holmeses also met Japanese visitors to Boston. A delegation of

leading Japanese statesmen led by Iwakura Tomomi came to Boston in

June 1872 and returned in August on its way to Europe. Since Dr. Holmes was known to be interested in Japan, he was on the welcoming committee in June and he read a poem at the farewell dinner in August.41

Wendell tutored two or three Japanese students to prepare them for Harvard Law School. The first was Inoue Yoshikazu, who arrived in Boston at the age of sixteen in 1868 and studied with Wendell in 1872.42 More students came with the Iwakura mission. Wendell tutored Kaneko

Kentaro, and probably Nawa Michikazu as well.43 Kaneko first met Wendell when he visited the latter's law office with Inoue in 1872. Kaneko himself studied law with Wendell in 1876 and continued to receive tutoring after he entered Harvard Law School. He became a

life-long family friend who called on Fanny and went to parties with Wendell.44

Many years later Wendell Holmes wrote Kaneko that he and Fanny had "a drawer full of Japanese prints and shelves of the little illustrated books, which we began buying when we were young and have always delighted in. My wife is the boss of that department."45 The Holmeses' collection of Japanese prints and illustrated books is now in the Library of Congress, as yet uncatalogued. There are a large number of prints, many of them full-size. Others are small ones that may be later reprints. The landscape prints include works by Hokusai and Hiroshige (see Fig. 8). Among the others are actor prints by Toyokuni and Kunisada, two

figure scenes by Kuniyoshi, and several by Yoshitoshi, as well as ten prints




of the Russo-Japanese War.46 Two books of colored prints of birds and flowers published in 1892 are also in the print collection.

The Holmeses' book collection also was a large resource for Japanese design. It includes fifty-four illustrated books, some in black and white and some in color. At least five volumes are by Hokusai: the Manga (sketchbooks), volumes 1, 10, and 14; Ehon Wakan-no-Homare (a book of warriors); and Ehon Orma Imagawa (a book of admirable women). These five volumes alone have more than 250 pages of illustrations, ranging from two-page scenes to sketches of eight or ten figures, plants, birds, or animals on a page. Several other volumes have similar illustrations by Hokusai or members of his school. Many of the books depict birds and flowers; others are drawing manuals. In addition there are another

twenty-four books of illustrated Japanese fairy tales published in English by Kobunsha and by T. Hasegawa in Tokyo in the 1910s.

The Holmeses had no children, but Wendell's nephew Edward

Jackson Holmes shared their interest in Oriental art. On a number of occasions, Edward and his mother, Mrs. Walter Scott Fitz, donated funds to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for purchasing Chinese and

Japanese art. Edward's interest in Oriental art was recognized by the museum when he was named Chairman of the Visiting Committee for the Department of Chinese and Japanese Art in 1907.47

Fanny Holmes's Career

Fanny's subject matter was something new in American needlework

(Figs. 5-7, 9, 11, 13-14). Earlier embroideries were largely samplers or floral or figure scenes. Most of these included people in a landscape or, less frequently, in an interior setting. Fanny omitted the people, however, and made the landscape her subject.

Her embroideries fit the spirit of the times. The second half of the nineteenth century was a period of new interest in the decorative arts across Europe and the United States. In the 1870s there was a growing desire to improve the artistic quality of American manufactures and

dwellings, inspired by the similar movement in England after the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851. One sign of this was the American publication of Charles L. Eastlake's Hints on Household Taste in 1872, edited by Charles C. Perkins, a writer on art and one of the founders of the Museum of Fine Arts.48 The interest in decoration in the United States in the 1870s was also partly due to the increasing availability of Japanese goods, which served as models of good design, as Sturgis observed.49




In spite of her retiring nature, Fanny exhibited her work on a number of occasions, usually with the work of other amateurs. Several of these exhibitions took place before her marriage in 1872.50 Hunt's statement that he and Miss Dixwell were the only creative artists in America was surely made during this period.

About this time, Fanny's embroideries began to receive public rec-

ognition. Her first notice in a national publication appeared in Scribner's

Monthly in 1873, when an anonymous critic (perhaps Clarence Cook) praised Fanny's work in a review of Perkins's edition of Eastlake's book.51 The critic complained about the poor state of the decorative arts in America and said that if a museum of good design of the period were to be established here, there would be only a few things worth exhibiting in it. He thought there should be some examples of English furniture, such as a sideboard or sofa by Morris and Marshall (that is, William Morris's

company Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.), with panels painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti or Edward Burne-Jones, or a cabinet by the architect and designer William Burges. The critic suggested that plates and dishes by Thodore Deck and Eugne Rousseau should also be in this

putative museum. Both Deck and Rousseau were major figures in French

nineteenth-century ceramics.52 The very first American objects that the Scribner's critic considered

were embroideries by "Miss Dixwell." It was high praise indeed for her work to be included in such illustrious company. The critic mentioned a few other Americans. He liked some Japanesque wallpaper designed by Russell Sturgis and thought some of the decorative work by the Amer- ican architect Jacob Wrey Mould was also worthy of inclusion in a museum.53 Since the Scribner's critic used Fanny's maiden name, he

presumably had seen her work at one of the exhibitions before her

marriage. The first descriptions of Fanny's embroideries were published in the

spring of 1875. Some of her panels were included in an exhibition of

professional and amateur decorative art mounted by the Boston Society of Architects. The president of this society was Wendell's relative Ed- ward Cabot, the owner of the first Japanese illustrated book in Boston. A

significant feature of this exhibition was the decorative work by women: painted silk fire-screens, boxes, decorative tiles, carved wood, and em-

broidery. The critic for the Atlantic Monthly noted that this section showed the "influence of our recent importation and study of Japanese art."54 He singled out the work of Fanny Holmes, which "stood easily foremost ... by virtue of her remarkably rich and graceful embroideries on silk." One piece showed "scattered fine pink and white blossoms in a



Fanny Dixwell Holmes and Japanism 5 1

cloud, with a few large brown or purple oak-leaves." Another was

Daisy -Field (Fig. 5), which would be described by several critics over the next few years.

Daisy-Field was large, about four feet high by one foot wide. For the

background Fanny used a piece of silk the color of "a rich golden twilight"55 - like the sunsets in the paintings by Turner that she had admired in London the year before. On this she sewed "a black embroidered growth of some sort, in which a crescent moon was tangled, with

many gold beads for stars, while below lay a mystic breadth of large white daisies spanned and surrounded by fine strands of green silk."56 The crescent moon is hard to see in the illustration. It is a small area with no horizontal lines hidden in the central tangle of branches, not quite an

eighth of the way down from the top. As the Atlantic Monthly's critic noted, there are a number of Japanese

features here. The elongated vertical format is highly unusual for an American landscape, but it is typical of a Japanese pillar print or one of

Hiroshige's bird and flower images.57 The strong diagonal lines of the fence and the field of daisies also recall Japanese art, as can be seen in such Hiroshige prints as Sudden Shower at Shono (Fig. 4). As in most

Japanese art, the composition is asymmetrical with a careful balance of the different elements. Another Japanese feature is the conflation of

space. The ground is seen from above, so that it appears to rise steeply until it is stopped by the diagonal fence.

Although Daisy -Field has a static subject, there is a strong suggestion of natural movement - another feature of Japanese art. The daisies rush forward in front of the tree on the left, crowding the lower edge as they appear to move into the viewer's space. Each daisy in the foreground has its own sense of life, like the swaying branches in the foreground of Sudden Shower at Shono and Autumn Moon on the Tama River (Figs. 4 and 8). The impression of movement in Daisy "Field was noticed at the time. A critic with the pen name "Greta," the Boston correspondent for Art Amateur y commented that the "mass of big daisies crowding into a heap in the foreground and thence pouring up in a milky way over the dusky hillside are like a glimpse of another and better world."58 Yet, despite the number of borrowings from Japanese art, the scene is clearly Western, not Japanese.

The next notice of Fanny's work appeared a year later when Cook

praised the embroideries of a Boston woman in his writings on decorative art in Scribner's Monthly.59 Although he did not mention Fanny by name, his descriptions of the way she worked, the Japanese influence in her

designs, and the acclaim she won surely identify Fanny as the "Boston




woman" According to Cook, her works were exquisite in every way. He added that although she had obviously been "stimulated by Japanese design, yet there was no resemblance to Japanese work except in what, for want of a better word, we call 'the motive.' " These pieces were "bits of external nature transferred by silk threads ... to the lady's silk or satin 'canvas' ... on a pale sapphire silk, she made a flight of apple-blossom petals drift before the wind, at one side the branch that bore them."

Finally, Cook reported with sincere, if sexist, praise that "she painted pictures with her needle that opened the doors of the artist guild to her as cordially as if she hadn't been a woman."

There is no illustration of the embroidery Cook discussed, but Milkweed is a somewhat similar "bit of external nature" (Fig. 6). The

subject is highly unusual - only milkweed seeds. They float down as light as air against a brown ground framed by dark pine needles with red berries below.60 As in Daisy-Field, the elongated format, the tight cropping, the

asymmetrical diagonal composition, and the silhouetted pine needles are all reminiscent of Japanese art (Fig. 4)-

In 1879 the critic "Greta" commented in Art Amateur on Hunt's

praise of Fanny Holmes's work and described two embroideries, Daisy- Field (Fig. 5) and

a silver sea in morning light, the ocean extending flat in its varying tints to the mid-height of the panel, where it meets the sky, across which stretch a few still clouds equally bright. The wonder of the work is the immense distance and superficial area depicted in the ocean and the still further-off concave created for the sky - far, far off - all out of a few strands of coarse sewing silk stitched, at random apparently, but of course with the finest knowledge of effect - across from one side of the frame.61

Fanny exhibited a dozen or so embroidery panels at the Museum of figure 5 (facing page) Fine Arts in Boston in the spring of 1880. Among them were Daisy-Field, Fanny Dixwell Holmes, Daisy-Field, c. Milkweed, Orchard, and Drifting Snow (Figs. 5-7, 11). A sunset scene 1874. Embroidery on silk. Wood engraving showed "the ends of two city blocks, with chimney-pots cutting black after a drawin8 bv Alfred Laurens Brennan.

i i 1.1 i. .j . i i j From Scribner's Monthly 22 (September against a winter sunset, and

i a i lamp 1.1 lighted

i. in a window .j in . the i third i j

story."62 A night scene had "a blue-black night-sky, with stars and crescent moon seen between shadowy, struggling branches." There were

.. .1-1 i ii FIGURE 6 (facing page) two river scenes,

.. one at night .1-1 with stars and

i a new moon, the ii other a T , w , 1 oo^ _ , T Holmes, , Milkweed, w , c. 1 looU. oo^ bmbroidery , on golden sunset." A field of goldenrod and asters had the sea beyond. sk Wood engraving after a drawing by Presumably this was a view from the Holmeses' summer house in Mat- Brennan. From Scribner's Monthly 22

tapoisett. (September 1881): 706.




Fanny's love of the sea was reflected in three marine embroideries in the exhibition. One showed "a silvery summer sea, with a huge, white becalmed sail that one would insist must be painted, in the midst of it."64 Greta compared the two other sea scenes to Turner's paintings. One had a smooth ocean with "a more wonderful than Turner's yellow beating upon its brazen surface from a morning sky." The other was "a bit of tossing blue ocean, with little waves climbing out of big waves as in Turner's 'Slave Ship,'

" a painting that had come to Boston in 1877 when it was bought by Clover Adams's cousin Alice Sturgis Hooper.

Greta reported that Fanny's works were the "art-sensation of the hour," and noted that they were "in a style that is the despair of our best landscapists."

For Mrs. Holmes's panels are pictures indeed - not mere curiosities of ingenious labor. There is no labor about them apparently - nothing like a 'stitch.' . . . They are pictures in the sense of repro- ducing completely and vividly scenes and states of nature, and conveying the appropriate sentiment in the liveliest manner.65

In addition, the Boston Daily Advertiser called the panels "the most remarkable needlework ever done" and said the needlewoman "is an artist; but instead of using paints and canvas, she makes her pictures with silk and satin, using her needle with masterly freedom, and producing tender or bold effects with the same ease that an accomplished painter does."66 The critic added, "Perspective, atmosphere, character are all given in this interesting work, and Mrs. Holmes knows how to produce any desired effect of light or warmth. . . . The style is her own - she invented it."

The next year Fanny exhibited some fifteen embroideries at one of the early exhibitions of the Society of Decorative Art of New York City.67 Judging by the descriptions of the pieces, at least eleven of these had been shown in Boston.

Fanny's works caused even a larger stir in New York than they had in Boston. William Crary Brownell praised them enthusiastically in the Nation, as did the art critic Mariana Griswold van Rensselaer in American Architect and Building News. Van Rensselaer noted that Fanny's work did not fit preconceived ideas about painting as opposed to decorative art, but it "fills a place that was not filled before."68 She added, "Certain effects are produced in these embroideries . . . that cannot be got with colors" - meaning with oil paints. The critic for Scribner's Monthly wrote they were more interesting than any other decorative arts that had been




exhibited by the society, and the notice reproduced wood engravings after five of them (Figs, 5-7, 9, II).69

Orchard was a favorite with the critics (Fig. 7). It showed a seaward

slope, presumably near Mattapoisett, covered by apple trees in bloom.70

Although this work does not look particularly Japanese at first glance, the

composition is more or less a mirror image of Hiroshige's Autumn Moon on the Tama River (Fig. 8), which the Holmses owned. The Scribner's critic particularly liked the opaline tints and praised the "pearl tones in the sky and the deep green of the sloping sward" bound together with a "mass of pinkish apple-blossoms."71 He called Fanny "one of the most sensitive colorists among American artists" and praised her works for their delicacy and power. He went on that landscape painters could learn from her "complete success in attaining illusion by gradations and op- positions of color without any light and shade."72 In the Nation Brownell wrote that Orchard was "a piece of refined color" and added, "This work alone would give Mrs. Holmes a place among her artist fellow-country- men, very few of whom show so much feeling for what is delicately poetic."73

With its varying hues of red sumac between willow branches, Pussy Willows was another work that received praise for its fine coloration (Fig. 9).74 Judging by the critics' descriptions, Fanny's use of subtle shades in the sky resembled the subtle tones in Whistler's paintings and in those by John La Farge (Figs. 3 and 10).

Both Fanny's diagonally based compositions and her treatment of color link her works to those of La Farge. La Farge deliberately borrowed features he saw in Japanese art to depict an American scene as naturally as he could. He even admitted at one point that he was trying to take "Chinese" compositions and render them in a way that looked Western, concealing the Oriental influence. Although La Farge said "Chinese," his work shows that he meant "Japanese." At the time, Westerners often failed to distinguish between the two terms.75

In La Farge's Snow Field, Morning, Roxbury, the composition is dominated by the diagonal horizon as Daisy-Field is by the line of the fence (Figs. 10 and 5). La Farge's composition is unusually spare for the time. In his "Essay on Japanese Art," he wrote that the Japanese art has a balance "of equal gravities, not of equal surfaces,"76 a balance that is

part of the asymmetry so typical of Japanese art. In Snow Field, he balanced the two trees on the right against the horizon line, leaving the center of the picture empty, an arrangement somewhat similar to that of

Hiroshige's Autumn Moon on the Tama River (Fig. 8). Fanny's Milkweed and Drifting Snow (Figs. 6 and 11) are similarly asymmetrical. Further-




more, both La Farge and Fanny Holmes were color is ts. La Farge carefully used color to evoke a certain time of year and time of day, a quality he had observed in Hiroshige's landscapes,77 Fanny, too, often depicted specific weather conditions as in Drifting Snow and her sea scenes.

Winslow Homer was another artist who adopted the diagonal, asymmetrical compositions of Hokusai and Hiroshige. This can be seen in most of his works from the early 1860s on, as in Breezing Up of 1876 and Autumn Moon on the Tama River (Figs. 12 and 8), where the sailboat is a strong diagonal form in the left part of the painting. Modern critics have been slow to recognize the strong Japanese influence in Homer's

compositions, because his figures and his landscapes are so typically American.

Like La Farge's and Homer's forms, Fanny's were Western, and like theirs were used in compositions derived from Japanese art. As the Scribner's critic observed at the time, the Japanese "treat landscape in the

way which we all know, and which is, perhaps, the most perfect example to be found of a treatment free and vivid, and at the same time conventional and logical. Mrs. Holmes, however, treats it as do our own

landscape-painters - that is to say, the abler of them."78 The three American artists differed in this respect from the Frenchmen Deck and Rousseau who used obvious Japanese motifs in their ceramics.

In several works Fanny showed nature growing and in motion, as in

Pussy Willows (Fig. 9). Here the branches thrust up, twist, bend, and sway with the feeling for organic life seen in Japanese lacquer and prints (Figs. 4 and 8). Lively growing plants are also illustrated in volume one of

FIGURE 7

Holmes, Orchard, c. 1880. Embroidery on silk. Wood engraving after a drawing by Brennan. From Scribner's Monthly 22

(September 1881): 703.




FIGURE 8

Hiroshige, Autumn Moon on the Tama

River, from the series Eight Views of the Environs of Edo, mid- 1830s. Woodblock

print, 22.1 X 35.1 cm. Oliver Wendell Holmes Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Hokusai's Manga, which the Holmeses owned, while Wendell's glove box

may have had similar plants. The sense of motion is even stronger in

Fanny's Milkweed (Fig. 6), where the milkweed pods burst open and the seeds drift down in the breeze, as the branches wave in Autumn Moon on the Tama River (Fig. 8).

Live flowers growing in nature was a new theme in the 1860s and 1870s. Similar scenes can be seen in the works of such painters as La

Farge, George Lambdin, and Fidelia Bridges. In 1875 the critic Earl Shinn specifically linked this new subject to the inspiring example of

Japanese art, "To convey a landscape-feeling along with groups that are

essentially still-life groups, has been a pleased object of study with many flower and bird painters . . . since the studios were flooded by Japanese patterns, with their statuesque groups of irises or tortoises in front, and a

quick dash to the illimitable horizon above."79

Fanny's Drifting Snow (Fig. 11) was even more innovative. It shows the fury of a drifting snow-storm lashing pine trees, which bend before its blast. The critics admired her depiction of the blizzard, her color and the shading of the snow, and the action of the wind,80 which is made visible both in the blowing snow and the bending trees, another important element derived from Japanese art.

Again, this scene has Japanese precedents and American parallels. Both Hiroshige and La Farge depicted calm snow scenes with softly falling individual flakes. Fanny, however, shows the lines of the wind-

whipped snow, as Hiroshige shows the rain in Sudden Shower at Shono

(Fig. 4). Like Hiroshige's plants, Fanny's tree bends before the force of




FIGURE 9

Holmes, Pussy Willows, 1880. Embroidery on silk. Wood engraving after a drawing by Brennan. From Scribner's Monthly 22


the wind. There were similar representations of rain in the Holmeses' books by Hokusai, in his Manga, volumes 10 and 14. Depictions of the effects of wind are rare in American landscape painting before this. The trees of Frederic Edwin Church do not bend, and even the storm scenes of Martin Johnson Heade show the action of light rather than wind. On the other hand, Winslow Homer did show the force of wind in a number of his works, most dramatically in the billowing sails and choppy sea of

Breezing Up (Fig. 12). Fanny's technique and use of materials were also innovative. She

used the satin background as the key for her color arrangements in a manner that reminded Brownell and the Scribner's critic of watercolors.81 On this ground she sometimes sewed long floating silk stitches. The critics wrote that she painted with threads. Her stitches were not those of traditional embroidery, but whatever she needed to create the desired effect. As Greta described it, "A single strand throws in with its subtly varied tint a mile of distance on the sea. A heaping up of crossing strands of pearly hues fills the deep sky with summer morning clouds."82 Or as van Rensselaer observed in discussing Drifting Snow (Fig. 11), "The

whirling snow ... is worked with every sort of thread, from thick crewel to the finest spool-cotton, in stitches that are eight inches long very often. It is said, indeed, that Mrs. Holmes works with white hairs when no cotton is fine enough to suit her purpose."83

Twilight in Mattapoisett Harbor, c. 1885, Fanny's only known work to survive, shows her unconventional use of stitches (Figs. 1344). The title is somewhat of a misnomer, since the work shows a head-on view of branches silhouetted against the evening sky rather than a vista down toward the beach and the water. This work belonged to Fanny's niece Anna Wigglesworth (Mrs. Philip R.) Chase and was given to the Pea- body Essex Museum in Salem by Fanny's grandnephew John P. Chase in 1980.

Fanny sewed Twilight in Mattapoisett Harbor on a piece of light amber silk almost three feet high. The sky itself is made up of three color areas of long stitches. The lowest band consists of long horizontal silk stitches in light amber, the color of the background silk, with a similar section of light brown silk stitches above. The top section is darker still. It has long light amber silk stitches like those below, interspersed with long dark brown wool ones. At first glance, all these long stitches appear to span the entire width of the piece. In fact, they are about three to six inches long. Their fragility is shown by the number that have broken over the years.




FIGURE 10

John La Farge, Snow Field, Morning,

Roxbury, 1864. Oil on bevelled mahogany panel, 30 X 25.1 cm. Art Institute of

Chicago, gift of Mrs. Frank L. Sulzberger in memory of Frank L. Sulzberger.

Fanny handled the underbrush at the bottom in a different manner. Here her stitches create an effect similar to that of Impressionist brush- strokes. First she sewed diagonal and vertical light brown silk stitches on the ground. Over these and crossing at different angles she sewed light brown wool stitches. Finally, she covered these with heavy dark brown wool stitches an inch or two long, slashing every which way. When seen close up, the entire area is an aggressive mass of heavy stitches. When seen from a slight distance, it is recognizable as a tangle of branches with light-colored marsh grasses beyond them.

The tree branches on the right side are sewn in two- or three-ply wool, in several shades of reddish brown, dark brown, and light brown. The stitches forming the branches are of various lengths and are sewn over the horizontal background stitches. The only other color appears in



60 Studies in the Decorative ArtslSpring-Summer 2003

FIGURE 11

Holmes, Drifting Snow, c. 1880. Wool, cotton, and other embroidery threads on silk. Wood engraving after a drawing by Brennan. From Scribner's Monthly 22


a few green wool stitches in the branches on the lower right. Today the

tonality suggests a fall scene. Undoubtedly the colors wete brighter a hundred years ago, perhaps more like a blazing sunset.

None of Fanny's stitches are those of conventional embroidery. They are totally different from those in the Peacock Screen attributed to the Royal School of Art Needlework, included in the recent Candace Wheeler exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.84 There, the stitches forming the central peacock in the screen are one half to

three-quarters of an inch long, but they are arranged in neat parallel rows. Fanny's stitches are much longer and sewn in every direction.

Although the art critics admired Fanny's work at the Society of Decorative Art exhibit, the professional embroiderers did not. Perhaps they resented her originality and the great acclaim her works received. In

any case, they complained that she did not use traditional stitches and that her stitches were too long for her works to be used for functional

things such as cushion covers. Embroiderers used to the delicate stitches of traditional embroidery may well have been offended by aggressively heavy, slashing stitches like those at the bottom of Twilight in Mattapoisett Harbor (Fig. 14).

A few years later, however, Wheeler implicitly approved Fanny's manner of working when she wrote that an embroiderer "will not even think of stitches when she begins to embroider." Wheeler used the work of Caroline Townsend as an example. "In her large flower portieres she had great patches of stocking darning used to indicate changes of color. It is not of stitches the artist embroiderer thinks, but of effects. ... To such a worker the needle expresses for her just as the pencil or brush

expresses for another."85 Another objection of the professional embroiderers was to Fanny's

challenge of the boundary between fine and decorative art. They were

vehemently opposed to her idea of framing these works as pictures on a wall. Humphreys remarked that she "has shown what wonderful effects can be wrought with the needle; but she has not demonstrated that it is desirable to produce effects in this way which can better be secured by other mediums."86 Others agreed that Fanny was aiming for effects that would be better achieved with paint. Although van Rensselaer felt

obliged to report some of this criticism in a subsequent article, she herself still admired the embroideries and wrote that they could be used on a fire screen or over a door.87 Such complaints about Fanny's work indicate how far ahead of her time was her use of textiles in art. Wheeler's

tapestries did not inspire the same sort of criticism, perhaps because they



Fanny Dixwell Holmes and ]apanism 61

FIGURE 12 Winslow Homer, Breezing Up (A Fair

Wind), 18734876. Oil on canvas, 61.3 X

94.3 cm. National Gallery of Art,

Washington, D.C., gift of the W. L. and

May T. Mellon Foundation.

fell into an established category of decoration and so were not seen as

breaching its boundaries with fine art.

Fanny's embroideries were exhibited at least one more time in New York. Four were included in the Pedestal Fund Art Loan Exhibi- tion in 1883-1884, an exhibition of art and decorative arts orga- nized by the National Academy of Design to raise funds for the

pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Cornelius Vanderbilt II lent three "Modern American" embroideries, " 'Apple Blossoms,' by Mrs. Holmes . . . 'Light in the Window' . . . 'Snow Storm.' "88 Apple Blossoms

may have been the work described by Cook as "a flight of apple- blossom petals drift[ing] before the wind, at one side the branch that bore them."89 The title Light in the Window fits the scene described by Greta as depicting "the ends of two city blocks, with chimney- pots cutting black against a winter sunset, and a lamp lighted in a window in the third story."90 The Art Amateur reported that

Fanny contributed "a striking snow-storm scene done in the same

way as were her embroideries which excited attention and com- ment here two years ago."91 Presumably, this was Vanderbilt's Snow Storm, since no other is listed in the catalogue. Unfortunately, the embroideries by Fanny that Vanderbilt owned have been lost.92 If their condition was like that of Twilight in Mattapoisett Harbor (Figs. 13-14), they may have been discarded by someone who did not realize their artistic value.

Orchard was also in the Pedestal Fund Exhibition. It was illustrated in the catalogue with the same wood engraving after a drawing by Alfred



62 Studies in the Decorative Arts/ Spring-Summer 2003

Brennan that had appeared in Scribner's Monthly (Fig, 7). This illustration was placed next to an entry reading "Embroideries. Boston Soc[iet]y of Decorative Art," in a way that implies Orchard was one of these works, none of which was listed individually.93

In the 1880s and 1890s, Fanny seems increasingly to have with- drawn from society. One acquaintance later reported that she was always shy in general company, and Boston society at the time did not welcome newcomers. As a result, Fanny tended to stay home embroidering whenever Wendell went out to dinner parties.94 In 1883 Clover Adams referred to her as someone who did not socialize much.95 On the other hand, Fanny accompanied Wendell to Europe during the summer of 1882, and went with him on a train trip to California after their

Mattapoisett house burned in the spring of 1888.96 She contracted

FIGURE 13

Holmes, Twilight in Mattapoisett Harbor, c. 1885. Wool and silk embroidery on silk, 81.9 X 38.1 cm. Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass. Photo c. 1885: Harvard Law Art Collection.

FIGURE 14 Holmes, detail of Fig. 13. Photograph by Mark Sexton, courtesy Peabody Essex

Museum, Salem, Mass.




rheumatic fever again in 1896 and was ill for a long time. For a while, she even lost her hair. She became reclusive, rarely leaving home.97

In 1902 President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Wendell to the Supreme Court of the United States. After the Holmeses moved to

Washington, Fanny quickly became much more sociable. The couple dined out or had guests for dinner nearly every night,98 and Fanny became even more popular in society than Wendell.

Before the Holmeses left Boston, Wendell burned many of his

papers. One of Fanny's friends reported that she destroyed most of her embroideries at the same time.99 Apparently she no longer valued her earlier works, or perhaps they had deteriorated because of the perishabil- ity of the materials. In either case, Wilde's comparison of Fanny to Homer's Penelope who unwove her own work at night proved to be all too apt. Although Fanny continued to embroider, and displayed at least one of her works on a wall of their Washington house,100 she effectively undid much of her previous career and thus contributed to her own fall into oblivion as an artist.

Conclusion

Though forgotten by the twentieth century, Fanny Holmes's works were highly influential during the 1880s. Several women exhibited embroideries in her style at the Pedestal Fund Exhibition. As one critic

reported, "her imitators are now legion."101 He singled out the work of Mrs. Andrew J. Peters of Cambridge, who exhibited "an ingenious and

FIGURE 15

Mary Elizabeth Tillinghast, portiere designed by John La Farge, c. 1882, for Mrs. John A. Zerega's drawing room, New York City. Wood engraving by James Davis Cooper. From Art Journal 10 (1884): 345.




finely managed landscape with setting sun." Mrs. Peters certainly was

working with Fanny's subject matter in Sunset, as was Mrs. L. D. Shears, who submitted two landscape embroideries, Sea Cliff and Light-house off the Coast of Alexandria.102

In addition, Fanny's work became a standard of comparison, both

positive and negative. In the early 1880s, Mary Elizabeth Tillinghast embroidered several portieres with landscape scenes. These were designed by John La Farge and presumably were sewn with conventional stitches. One critic commented that in a pair of curtains depicting tree branches, "the realistic suggestion is conveyed thoroughly to the mind, yet the effect is far from approaching the extreme which carried Mrs. O. W. Holmes's embroidery beyond the bounds of legitimate decoration."103 A more positive view of Fanny's work was implied when a Japanesque portiere by Tillinghast and La Farge (Fig. 15) was described as showing "a sunset landscape . . . somewhat in the style of the embroi-

FIGURE 16 Candace Wheeler, curtain designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, 1880, for Madison

Square Theatre, New York City. Wood

engraving by G. Gibson. From Art Journal 6 (1880): 139.



deries recently exhibited in New York by Mrs. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr/>104

Candace Wheeler went further. She described one of her own works, a theater curtain she made for Louis Comfort Tiffany for the Madison

Square Theatre, as resembling "one of Mrs. Holmes' silk pictures on a

large scale."105 Surely this is one of the highest compliments that one artist could pay another! In fact, Wheeler made two sets of curtains for the Madison Street Theatre, since the first was destroyed by fire. The first set (Fig. 16) showed an asymmetrical scene with "a wilderness of shrubs and flowers and bulrushes growing luxuriantly in a deep-blue pool of water, on which a fitful wind traced its filmy ripples. Brilliant marsh- flowers, tender blossoms, birds and butterflies of the brightest hues, glittered among the sombre rushes and hung from the wreathing vines."106 The second set had a Florida landscape stretched along its bottom, but it lacked the Japanese diagonals and asymmetry that animate

Fanny's work.107

Forty years later, Wheeler still remembered the impact of Fanny Holmes's embroideries. In her book The Development of Embroidery in America, she remarked that needlework had almost died out in United States by the middle of the nineteenth century and she praised the

inspiring example of Fanny's work as playing an important role in the revival of American embroidery.108

Fanny Holmes's life and work show that she was an important part of the early period of Japanism in Boston. Like La Farge and Homer, she collected Japanese prints and used Japanese compositional ideas to en- liven her depictions of American plants and landscapes. It was, however, her own blend of these disparate elements, her evocation of movement in landscapes, her innate color sense, and her challenge to the division between fine and decorative arts that made her embroideries so striking and original - and so widely imitated. As her friends insisted, she did indeed create a new art.


NOTES

This article is based in part on the research done for my doctoral dissertation "The American Re- action to Japanese Art, 1853-1876," Rutgers Uni-

versity, 1996. Portions of the article were pre- sented at the Art History Graduate Student

Symposium at Rutgers University in March 1995. I want to thank Martin Eidelberg, Rutgers Uni-

versity, for all his help and encouragement over the years, as well as Katherine Blood, Barbara

Dash, and Debra Wynn, Library of Congress; Ulysses G. Dietz, The Newark Museum, Newark, N.J.; Amelia Peck, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Paula Bradstreet Richter, Peabody Essex Mu- seum, Salem, Mass.; Elizabeth Roberts, Mattapoi- sett Historical Society, Mattapoisett, Mass.; James Shea, Longfellow National Historic Site, Cam-

bridge, Mass.; Steven R. Smith, Harvard Law School Art Collection; William Stout, The Frick



66 Studies in the Decorative Arts/ Spring-Summer 2003

Collection, New York; Deborah Dependahl Wa-

ters, The Museum of the City of New York; and

James L. Yarnall, John La Farge Catalogue Rai-

sonn, Inc., New Canaan, Conn., for their kind assistance.

1. Greta, "Boston Correspondence," Art Amateur 2 (October 1880): 119.

2. Oscar Wilde to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes

[Fanny's father-in-law], undated; quoted in Mark de Wolfe Howe, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: The

Proving Years 1870-1882 (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), 255, n. 4. This letter was written sometime after Wilde's visit to Boston in 1882.

In Homer's Odyssey, Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus, was besieged by a host of suitors who assumed that he had died during his ten years of

wandering after the Trojan War. Finally, she prom- ised to choose one suitor after she had woven a shroud for her father-in-law. Each night she se-

cretly unwove what she had woven during the day, and so she carefully managed not to finish the

weaving before Odysseus returned.

3. Howe, Justice Oliver Holmes, 255.

4. Nathaniel Bowditch, The New American Practi- cal Navigator (Newburyport, Mass., 1802). This

guide was so useful that it remained in print for more than 150 years. The latest edition in the New York Public Library was published by the United States Navy in 1962.

5. Liva Baker, The Justice from Beacon Hill: The

Life and Times of Oliver Wendell Holmes (New York, 1991), 21-22; Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Professor's Story," Atlantic Monthly 5 (January 1860): 93. This was published in book form as Elsie Venner (Boston, 1861). Later the meaning of "Bos- ton Brahmin" shifted, so that the term came to mean the social elite rather than the intellectuals.

6. Baker, The Justice from Beacon Hill, 220.

7. Silas Bent, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (New York, 1932), 142.

8. Catherine Drinker Bowen, Yankee from Olym- pus: Justice Holmes and His Family (Boston, 1944), 362. Although this was a biographical novel, Bowen wrote that all direct quotations came from written records or word-of-mouth testimony from

people who knew the family; see Bowen, 433.

9. Baker, Justice from Beacon Hill, 91-92, 220; Ol- iver Wendell Holmes Jr., "Notes on Albert Drer," Harvard Magazine 7, no. 2 (October 1860): 41-47; Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., "Pre-Raphaelitism," Harvard Magazine 7, no. 9 (June 1861): 345-48.

10. Baker, Justice from Beacon Hal, 193, 197. This

group became the Metaphysical Club in January 1872; see Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club

(New York, 2001), 201-05; Baker, Justice from Bea- con Hal, 215-16.

11. William James to Garth Wilkinson James, March, 21, 1866, in William James, The Correspon- dence of William James, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis et

al., 4 vols. (Charlottesville, Va., 1993-1995), 4:135; Sheldon M. Novick, Honorable Justice: The

Ufe of Oliver Wendell Holmes (Boston, 1989), 103; Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 205.

12. William James to Thomas Ward, March 27, 1866, in James, Correspondence, 4:138.

13. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. to William James, December 15, 1867, in James, Correspondence, 4:236.

14. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. to William James, April 19, 1868, in James, Correspondence, 4:290.

15. Minny Temple to Henry James, November

1869, quoted in Howe, Justice Oliver Wendell

Holmes, 199-200, n."f."

16. Minny Temple to John Gray, November, 1869, quoted in Novick, Honorable Justice, 120.

17. William James to Henry Pickering Bowditch, December 29, 1869, in James, Correspondence, 4:398. Bowditch was Fanny's first cousin and a former pupil at her father's school.

18. Bent, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, 142.

19. Baker, Justice from Beacon Hill, 222-223; Menand, Metaphysical Club, 216, 226; William

James to Henry James, November 24, 1872, in

James, Correspondence, 1:177.

20. William James to Henry James, October [10], 1872, in James, Correspondence, 1:173.

21. Oliver Wendell Holmes to Mrs. Hamlin, Oc- tober 12, 1930, copy in the Mattapoisett Historical

Society.

22. William James to Henry James, July 5, 1876 in

James, Correspondence, 1:269.

23. Mary James to Henry James, December 3, 1873, quoted in Howe, Justice Oliver Wendell

Holmes, 2:22; James Kent, Commentaries on Amer- ican Law, 4 vols., 12th ed., ed. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (Boston, 1873). Mary James was report- ing an account from Sara Sedgwick, one of Fanny's friends.

24. Howe, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, 2:96.

25. Fanny B. Holmes, "Diary of 1874 Trip," June 17, 1874, Oliver Wendell Holmes Papers, Harvard Law School, reel 16, frame 910. See also Robin

Spencer, "Whistler's First One Man Exhibition," in Gabriel P. Weisberg et al., The Documented

Image: Visions in Art History (Syracuse, 1987), 27- 49.

26. Fanny B. Holmes, "Diary of 1874 Trip," June 17, 1874, reel 16, frame 910.

27. Fanny B. Holmes, "Diary of 1874 Trip," June 23, 1874, reel 16, frame 922; Novick, Honorable

Justice, 105; Catherine Lynn, "Surface Ornament:

Wallpapers, Carpets, Textiles, and Embroidery," in Doreen Bolger Burke et al., in Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement, exh. cat.

(New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986), 95-97.

28. Clover Hooper was a granddaughter of the China trader Capt. William Sturgis.

29. Robert Elton Berry, Yankee Stargazer: The Life of Nathaniel Bowditch (New York and London, 1941), 65-79, 87-93, 99-110, 130-38.

30. Bowditch was on the Astrea, which arrived in Batavia on December 17, 1799. The Franklin arrived in Batavia on December 18, 1799; see Berry, Yankee Stargazer, 103-4; E. S. W., "The First Voy- age to Japan," Historical Collections of the Essex Institute 2, no. 6 (December 1860): 288.

31. Royal Cortissoz, John La Farge (Boston and New York, 1911), 122; Henry Adams, "La Farge's Discovery of Japanese Art," Art Bulletin 47, no. 3

(September 1985): 483, no. 459. Note that the

Henry Adams mentioned in the footnotes is the

twentieth-century art historian, not his nine-

teenth-century namesake. La Farge imported his

prints through Abiel Abbot Low, a New York China trade merchant, who summered in Newport and who started trading with Japan early in 1860; see Christine Wallace Laidlaw, "The American Reaction to Japanese Art, 1853-1876" (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1996), 137, n. 21.

32. Helen Knowlton, Art-Life of William Morris Hunt (Boston, 1899), 126. Knowlton was one of Hunt's prize art pupils.

33. Ibid., 126. Amelia Jackson Holmes was also a cousin of Cabot's sister-in-law Hannah Lowell

Jackson; see L. Vernon Briggs, History and Geneal-

ogy of the Cabot Famy 1475-1927 (Boston, 1927), 1:266-67, 272-74; 2:685.

34- The present-day Henry Adams was the first to note Hunt's influence on Winslow Homer; see



Fanny Dixwell Holmes and japanism 67

Martha J. Hoppin and Henry Adams, William Mor- ris Hunt (Boston, 1979), 28-31.

35. Russell Sturgis, "The Fine Arts of Japan. Part

1," Nation 7 (July 2, 1868): 16.

36. Noah Brooks, "Japanese Fans," Scribner's

Monthly 6 (September 1873): 616-21.

37. Novick, Honorable Justice, 117.

38. Clover Adams to Dr. Robert William Hooper, April 20, 1873, in Marian Hooper Adams, The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams, ed. Ward Thoron

(Boston, 1936), 99. The Household-Art Company also sold Chinese and Japanese ceramics in Boston at this time; see Clarence Cook, "Art," Atlantic

Monthly 31, no. 184 (February 1873): 245.

39. For the reading of letters to relatives and

friends, see Christine Wallace Laidlaw, ed., Charles

Appleton Longfellow: Twenty Months in Japan 1871- 1873 (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 112, 116, 144, 162. Some three years earlier, when he was in

Kashmir, Charles had inquired after Fanny's mother, Mrs. Dixwell; see Charles Appleton Long' fellow to Alice Longfellow, September 16, 1869, Longfellow National Historic Site, Cambridge, Mass. Charles also bought home cases of Japanese goods and created one of the first Japanesque rooms in the United States; see Christine Wallace Laid-

law, "Charles Longfellow: Explorer and Describer of Japan," Orientations 29, no. 11 (December 1998): 32-35.

40. Alice Mary Longfellow to Charles Appleton Longfellow, March 17, 1872, and Edith Longfellow to Charles Appleton Longfellow, July 12, 1872, Longfellow National Historic Site, Cambridge, Mass.

41. James Kanda and William A. Gifford, "The Kaneko Correspondence," Monumenta Nipponica 37, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 44, n. 10; The Diary of Kido Takayoshi, trans. Sidney Devere Brown and Akiko Hirota (Tokyo, 1985), 2:193, n. 28.

42. Wendell and Fanny may also have known Yamada Ineyasu, who entered Harvard Law School in 1871 and was a friend of the Longfellows; see

Laidlaw, ed., Charles Appleton Longfellow, 112, 116, 165, 180. Inoue Yoshikazu became a law professor at the University of Tokyo, while Yamada Ineyasu was first a customs inspector in Yokohama and then opened an art business; see Kanda and Gif- ford, "Kaneko Correspondence," 44, nn. 11, 14, 15.

43. Kanda and Gifford, "Kaneko Correspon- dence," 44; Novick, Honorable Justice, 132, 133, 147, 155.

44. Kaneko even published a story in the Atlantic

Monthly in 1878: see N. T. Kaneko, "Mosume Sets

Yo; or, Woman's Sacrifice," Atlantic Monthly 42, no. 249 (July 1878): 81-91. This was a typically tragic Japanese love story.

Kaneko became an important Japanese states- man and diplomat. In later years, he visited the Holmeses in Boston and in Washington. In 1908 he arranged for the Emperor of Japan to give Fanny Holmes a set of golden cups in recognition of her warm friendship to him and to Japan; see Kanda and Gifford, "Kaneko Correspondence," vol. 37, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 41-42, 46; no. 2 (Summer 1982): 231, 234, 236, 246, 295-96; no. 3 (Fall 1982): 314; no. 4 (Winter 1982): 429, 435; Novick, Honorable Justice, 147-48, 155.

45. Oliver Wendell Holmes to Viscount Kaneko Kentaro, March 21, 1924, in Kanda and Gifford, "Kaneko Correspondence," vol. 37, no. 3 (Fall 1982): 316.

46. One of the Holmeses' Kunisada prints, a de-

piction of the actor Ichikawa Danjr, is illustrated in The Library of Congress, The Floating World of Ukiyo-e: Shadows, Dreams, and Substance (New York, 2001), 60-61.

47. Wendell's brother Edward Jackson Holmes Sr. died young, and his widow, Henrietta Wiggles- worth Holmes, married the China trader Walter Scott Fitz. Edward Jr. was named Director of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1926 and then President in 1934. He gave the museum many objects over the years, including a painting by Claude Monet and examples of Persian metalwork; see Walter Muir Whitehill, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

(Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 1:131-32, 356-57, 372- 73, 408-09; 2:451, 461, 529-30.

48. Charles C. Perkins in Charles L. Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste, ed. Charles C. Perkins (Boston, 1872), xiii-xv. The original edition was

published in London in 1868.

49. Russell Sturgis, review of Jarves, A Glimpse at

Japanese Art, in the Nation 22, no. 252 (January 27, 1876): 68.

50. "The Fine Arts," Boston Daily Advertiser (April 19, 1880): 2. This report did not give any details about these early exhibitions.

51. Anon, (possibly Clarence Cook), "Art in Our Homes and Schools," Scribner's Monthly 5, no. 4 (February 1873): 511-15. Clarence Cook wrote

many articles about decorative art for Scribner's

Monthly in the 1870s.

52. Anon., "Art in Our Homes and Schools," 513. Thodore Deck made ceramics with Japanese and Near Eastern motifs, while Eugne Rousseau produced the first European ware with Japanese motifs, a dinner service designed by Flix Braquemond in 1866 with motifs from Hokusai and other ukiyo-e artists who were influenced by Japanese art; see Martin Eidelberg and William R. Johnston, "Japonisme and French Decorative Arts" in Gab- riel P. Weisberg et al., Japonisme: Japanese Influence on French Art, 1854-1910 (Cleveland, 1975), 141- 43, 157-58, 159, 172.

53. Anon., "Art in Our Homes and Schools," 513- 14.

54. Anon., "Art," Atlantic Monthly 36, no. 213

(July 1875): 125. The exhibition included English tiles, wallpapers, and draperies; ceramics from Charles A. Lawrence of Beverly, Mass.; and metalwork by Wm. H. Jackson & Co. of New York and

by Murdock & Co. of Boston.

55. Greta, "Our Boston Letter," Art Amateur 1 , no. 5 (October 1879): 96-97.

56. Anon., "Art," Atlantic Monthly, 125; Fanny B.

Holmes, "Diary of 1874 Trip," June 17, 1874, reel

16, frame 910.

57. A pillar print was a long and narrow Japanese print, so called because it could be fastened to a

pillar. Hiroshige's A Little Brown Owl on a Pine Branch with a Crescent Moon Behind (Rhode Island School of Design 34.220) is 36.4 X 13 cm; see

Cynthea J. Bogel, Israel Goldman, and Alfred H.

Marks, Hiroshige: Birds and Flowers (New York, 1988), no. 2. Daisy -Field was about four feet high and one foot wide; see Greta, "Our Boston Letter," 96.

58. Greta, "Our Boston Letter," 97.

59. Clarence Cook, "Beds and Tables, Stools and Candlesticks. Ill," Scribner's Monthly 11, no. 4

(February 1876): 493-94.

60. For the colors in Milkweed, see Mary Gay Humphreys, "Mrs. Holmes's Art-Embroideries," Art Amateur 4, no. 6 (May 1881): 127.

61. Greta, "Our Boston Letter," 96-97.

62. Greta, "Boston Correspondence," 119-120.

63. Anon., "The Fine Arts," Boston Daily Adver- tiser (April 19, 1880): 2.

64. Greta, "Boston Correspondence," 119.

65. Ibid., 119-20.




66. Anon., "The Fine Arts," Boston Daily Adver- tiser (April 19, 1880): 2.

67. The Society was founded in 1877, largely through the efforts of the textile designer and embroiderer Candace Wheeler, who had been in-

spired by the exhibit of the Royal School of Art Needlework at the Philadelphia Centennial in 1876. Like its English model, the Society of Dec- orative Art was intended to serve as a source of income for gentlewomen, so it, too, had a school with needlework teachers from London, a work-

shop, exhibition gallery, and sales outlet; see Can- dace Wheeler, The Devebpment of Embroidery in America (New York, 1921), 106-16; Amelia Peck and Carol Irish, Candace Wheeler: The Art and

Enterprise of American Design 1875-1900, exh. cat.

(New Haven and London, for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), 24, 27-36.

68. Mariana Griswold van Rensselaer, "Letter from New York," American Architect and Building News 9 (April 30, 1881): 211; William Crary Brownell, "Mrs. Holmes's Landscapes," Nation 32, no. 825 (April 21, 1881): 286.

69. Anon., "Society of Decorative Art. (New York.)," Scribner's Monthly 22, no. 5 (September 1881): 703, 706-9.

70. Greta, "Boston Correspondence," 120.

71. Anon., "Society of Decorative Art," 708. See also van Rensselaer, "Letter from New York," 211; Humphreys, "Mrs. Holmes's Art-Embroideries," 127.

72. Anon., "Society of Decorative Art," 709.

73. Brownell, "Mrs. Holmes's Landscapes," 286.

74. Humphreys, "Mrs. Holmes's Art-Embroider-

ies," 127.

75. John La Farge, "Memoranda," sheet 123, as

quoted in Adams, "La Farge's Discovery of Japa- nese Art," 465. For the misuse of "Chinese" for

"Japanese" in Europe and the United States, see Adams, 465, n. 85.

76. John La Farge, "Essay on Japanese Art," in

Raphael Pumpelly, Across America and Asia (New York, 1870), 197.

77. La Farge, "Essay on Japanese Art," 201.

78. Anon., "Society of Decorative Art," 707.

79. Earl Shinn, "The Water-color Society's Exhi- bition. Ill," Nation 20, no. 505 (March 4, 1875): 156.

80. Van Rensselaer, "Letter from New York," 211; Greta, "Boston Correspondence," 120; Hum-

phreys, "Mrs. Holmes's Art-Embroideries," 127.

81. Brownell, "Mrs. Holmes's Landscapes," 286; Anon., "Society of Decorative Art," 708.

82. Greta, "Our Boston Letter," 97.

83. Van Rensselaer, "Letter from New York," 211.

84. Peck and Irish, Candace Wheeler, 98-99.

85. Mary Gay Humphreys, "Embroidery in Amer- ica. II - Mrs. Wheeler tells how one may become an artist with the needle," Art Amateur 18, no. 3

(February 1888): 71. Sarah B. Sherrill kindly brought this quotation to my attention.

86. Humphreys, "Mrs. Holmes's Art-Embroider-

ies," 127.

87. Mariana Griswold van Rensselaer, "Mrs. Holmes's Embroideries," American Architect and

BuMngNews 9, no. 281 (May 14, 1881): 238.

88. National Academy of Design, Catalogue of the Pedestal Fund Art Loan Exhibition (New York, 1883), 155-56.

89. Clarence Cook, "Beds and Tables, Stools and Candlesticks. Ill," 493-94.

90. Greta, "Boston Correspondence," 119-20.

91. Anon., "The Pedestal Fund Art Loan Exhibi-

tion," Art Amateur 10, no. 2 (January 1884): 46; National Academy of Design, Catalogue of the Ped- estal Fund Art Loan Exhibition, 155-56.

92. Although many Vanderbilt belongings were taken to the Breakers in Newport before the New York house was demolished in 1927, these embroideries are not in the Breakers now: Paul F. Miller, Curator of The Preservation Society of Newport County, to Christine W. Laidlaw, March 1, 2001. Miller and Claudia Thiel kindly searched through the Breakers, but found no traces of Fanny's embroideries or any documents relating to them.

93. National Academy of Design, Catalogue of the Pedestal Fund Art Loan Exhibition, 156.

94. Katherine P. Loring to Mark DeWolfe Howe, June 4, 1942, in Holmes Papers, reel 41, frames 358-63.

95. Marian Adams, The Letters of Mrs. Henry Ad-

ams, 437.

96. Baker, Justice from Beacon Hill, 264-65, 293-94; William James to Henry James, October 14, 1888, in James, Correspondence, 2:93. The Mattapoisett house was not rebuilt.

97. Baker, Justice from Beacon Hill, 313.

98. Katherine Loring to Mark Howe, June 4, 1942, in Holmes Papers, reel 41, frames 358-63; Baker, Justice from Beacon Hill, 371.

99. Mrs. James B. Ayer reported this destruction to Mark Howe; see Howe, Holmes, 255, n. 5.

100. Novick, Honorable Justice, 265. She would say it was done by Wendell's first wife whenever guests admired it.

101. Anon., "The Pedestal Fund Art Loan Exhi- bition" Art Amateur, 46.

102. National Academy of Design, Catalogue of the Pedestal Fund Art Loan Exhibition, 155.

103. Anon., "Artistic Needlework in New York," Art Amateur 6, no. 3 (February 1882): 61. For some of Mary Elizabeth Tillinghast's other embroideries, see James L. Yarnall, "Souvenirs of Splendor: John La Farge and the Patronage of Cornelius Vander- bilt II," The American Art Journal 26, nos. 1-2

(1994): 78-88, 102 n. 29.

104. Artistic Houses (New York, 1883-1884; re-

print, New York, 1971), 1:63. The scene is reminiscent of an illustration in Hokusai, Manga, vol. 2.

105. Wheeler, Development of Embroidery in Amer-

ica, 125.

106. Anon., "A Model Theatre," Art Journal 6

(May 1880): 141.

107. For a discussion of both curtains, see Roberta A. Mayer and Carolyn K. Lane, "Disassociating the 'Associated Artists': The Early Business Ventures of Louis C. Tiffany, Candace T. Wheeler, and Lockwood de Forest," Studies in the Decorative Arts

7, no. 2 (Spring-Summer 2001): 12, 34, nn. 43-44. The second curtain is illustrated in Mayer and Lane, "Disassociating the 'Associated Artists,' "13.

108. Wheeler, Development of Embroidery in Amer-

ica, 116.



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Issue Table of ContentsStudies in the Decorative Arts, Vol. 10, No. 2 (SPRING-SUMMER 2003) pp. 1-174Front MatterThe Werksttte Hagenauer: Design and Marketing in Vienna between the World Wars [pp. 2-20]The Deutsche Werksttten and the Dissemination of Mainstream Modernity [pp. 21-41]Painting with Silken Threads: Fanny Dixwell Holmes and Japanism in Nineteenth-Century Boston [pp. 42-68]Axes of Construction: An Analysis of Dutch Art Nouveau Carpet Designs by T. A. C. Colenbrander [pp. 69-135]Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 136-139]Review: untitled [pp. 139-143]Review: untitled [pp. 143-145]Review: untitled [pp. 145-148]Review: untitled [pp. 148-150]Review: untitled [pp. 150-153]Review: untitled [pp. 154-160]Review: untitled [pp. 160-162]Review: untitled [pp. 162-167]Review: untitled [pp. 167-170]

Books Received [pp. 171-173]Research Inquiry [pp. 174-174]Letter [pp. 174-174]Back Matter

christine laidlaw - painting with silken threads

Documents

fanny holmess works

early japanism

jstor terms

jstor archive

utcyour use

innovative works

oliver wendell holmes

early period of japanism