I’m having my morning coffee before heading out for what will be a long day. I wanted to take a few brief moments however to note that Jim Croce and Maury Muehleisen died on this date fifty years ago today. Maury Muehleisen’s name may be less familiar to many, but it was his guitar work that made so much of Croce’s work come to life. Croce was thirty and Muehleisen all of twenty-four when the plane in which they were flying from Natchitoches, Louisiana to an upcoming show in Texas crashed. They and four others were all killed.
When Jim was in the Army National Guard there were banks of pay telephone booths on base from which at scheduled times enlisted men were allowed to call home. Croce never forgot the scenes he sometimes saw play out in which men who had received Dear John letters called their wives or girlfriends to learn as much as they could in the amount of time their ten cents allowed to learn why their sweethearts had left them. From those experiences came one of Jim Croce’s most poignant songs.
Hank Williams was born on this date in 1923. I noticed that there are a number of events in various places across the country and around the world this weekend through the coming week to commemorate what would have been his 100th birthday. I think it’s lost on some what a universal figure Hank is. Go half way around the world and you will find people who listen the man who is still the father of country music. His power was in the directness of the message. “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” “Why Don’t You Love Me (Like You Used to Do)” “Mind Your Own Business” Three chords and truth applied to no one more than Hank. Whatever his flaws as a human being—and they were many—Williams always regarded himself as a work in progress and capable of redemption. That’s what makes his gospel recordings so powerful.
I hope everyone’s Labor Day weekend is going well. After the grind that was the first full week of the academic year I consciously stepped away from anything work-related on Saturday and Sunday. Today I’ll do laundry, clean the house, and send some emails. I’m in the midst of a project this semester that has proven more complicated and time-consuming than I’d originally envisioned. I’m trying to learn a few new skillsets on the fly, which to put it mildly has been a challenge. I’m trying to control what I can and pace myself for the remainder of what will be a challenging term. Yesterday I went to the Brooklyn Museum of Art. It was a gorgeous late summer day. Prospect Park was full and Eastern Parkway lined with vendors.
Daniel Huntington’s 1861 “The Republican Court (Lady Washington’s Reception Day)”
One of my favorite spots in the Brooklyn Museum is the visible storage facility. I’ve seen similar layouts at the New-York Historical Society, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery/American Art Museum. Apparently the Henry Luce Association funded these and similar facilities, most if not all of which have names mentioning Luce . Visible storage, sometimes called open storage, is a way for museum visitors to view items not on display in the galleries. Strolling through I noticed Daniel Huntington’s “The Republican Court (Lady Washington’s Reception Day).” It portrays one of First Lady Martha Washington’s fêtes at the Presidents House in Philadelphia in the 1790s. It’s actually quite large, about six feet tall and twelve feet across. The year if came out—1861—is significant. The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association had been founded in 1853, and they opened Washington’s home as a museum in 1860. As the secession crises was heating up both sides were claiming the Founders as their own. Huntington produced this work the year of Fort Sumter and First Bull Run.
A quick dive into the Brooklyn Daily Eagle informs us that Latham Avery Fish purchased “The Republican Court (Lady Washington’s Reception Day)” for $3,300 from the A.T. Stewart collection in 1887 and sold it for that same value to the Alexander Hamilton Club at Clinton and Remsen Streets. The Union League Club of New York also coveted the painting but fell short in the bidding. Years later, President Theodore Roosevelt, a devout Hamiltonian, tried to purchase the artwork for $50,000—upwards of $1.5 million in today’s dollars—for the Library of Congress. That fell through. The Hamilton Club eventually merged with the Crescent Club and when the Hamilton clubhouse was torn down in the mid-1930s this and other pieces ended up moving to the Crescent clubhouse at Clinton and Pierrepont Streets. It became a fixture of Washington’s Birthday commemorations. Crescent-Hamilton Athletic Club members were generous with the painting, lending it to the Brooklyn Museum in 1932 for a big exhibit coinciding with the George Washington bicentennial. It really is one of the most iconographic pieces of Washingtonia, which is saying a lot. As I have been able to gather, the Crescent-Hamilton Athletic Club donated “The Republican Court (Lady Washington’s Reception Day)” to the Brooklyn Museum in 1939. I’m glad it has remained in the borough.
The Strawfoot 