News

Western culture began defining itself in contrast to the East as early as the Trojan War of Greek versus Persian. In the centuries to follow, as European civilization advanced, its soldiers, traders, adventurers, and artists increasingly perceived the East as a nostalgic counterpart to progress. Across much of the second millennium, Europe conceived of the regions from Egypt to Turkey to India and, eventually, to China and Japan as places to be studied, traveled, occupied, commodified, and poeticized.   After World War Two, as empires fragmented and the new field of postcolonial studies arose, scholars in both hemispheres gave a [...]

In recent years there has been an increasing interest in servant life at the Mansion. Last fall, our Celtic Storytelling programming included traditional Irish tales that the house's servants might have delighted in around late October. This May, we look forward to opening a new space in the Mansion to include the house's employees in our interpretation. What little is known about the servants has been primarily pieced together from census records. However, these records are by no means comprehensive since most of the servants would have listed other residences as their permanent addresses. What follows is perhaps a microcosm of [...]

After months of preparation and planning, including the safe removal and relocation of all furniture and furnishings from the Parlor, conservators have officially begun work on the room's walls and ceilings. After a detailed surface cleaning, conservators are now in the process of re-adhering flaking and damaged paint and gold leaf. Once this step is completed, they will then remove disfiguring soot and grime that has been accumulating over the last 160 years, much of it from the Mansion's original coal furnace. Though the methodology is very similar to the recent project in the Reception Suite, finding space within the [...]

In 1846, the German-American history painter Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze created 'The Iconoclasts', a large oil canvas depicting 17th-century English Protestants destroying art works in a Catholic church. The painting was commissioned by James Robb, a banker and collector then living in New Orleans. During the financial panic of 1857, Robb sold his home and much of his art.[1] As friends of Victoria Mansion know, Ruggles Morse purchased 'The Iconoclasts' and later hung it in the Parlor of his new summer home in Portland, Maine. Leutze was by then famous, having painted 'Washington Crossing the Delaware' in 1851. The painting "caused a [...]

With the excitement of the Christmas season now behind us, Mansion staff shifts focus to the two major conservation projects in the Reception Room and the Parlor. One recent advancement was the re-installation of the Reception Room's gasolier (originally gas-powered lighting fixture), and the de-installation of the Parlor's. The Reception Room's remarkable 250 lb. gasolier, comprised of more than 200 individual parts, was taken down over three years ago while conservators worked on the room's walls and ceilings. Last month with the assistance of the Wilson Moving Company, the fully cleaned and conserved fixture was reinstalled in its proper place. Concurrently, the massive [...]