For the fourth summer, the National Portrait Gallery is proud to host the Teen Ambassadors, a group of Washington, D.C., high school students selected to perform as various NPG portrait sitters. The Teen Ambassadors spend several weeks in research and writing after choosing the person they wish to portray. Beginning this week, they will deliver their monologues in front of their respective chosen sitter. Individual performances are three to five minutes, and the collective experience usually lasts slightly over an hour.
"Each of these young people brings something special with them; while some of them are performers, others are writers, and this opportunity allows them to explore and develop talents that will augment their existing passions," observes Geri Provost-Lyons, NPG’s Youth and Family Coordinator and director of the Teen Ambassador program. Provost-Lyons adds, "We are fortunate in that we have so many gifted young people who commit themselves completely and professionally to present these vignettes. They truly craft excellent work."
The 2010 Teen Ambassadors, preparing for their "Portraits Alive!" performances. The students spend several weeks in research and writing.
L-R: Geri Provost-Lyons, director of the Teen Ambassador Program; Molly Katchpole, Smithsonian Katzenberger Art History Intern; and Erica Joyce, NPG intern.
The summer of 1979 will live on in my childhood memories. At the ripe old age of nine, my neighborhood pals and I were already masters of summer vacation fun. We made numerous trips to the community pool, played innumerable backyard games of red light, green light; tag; and hide-and-seek, and spent countless hours dashing through our lawn sprinklers. We took every opportunity to play outside, where we would remain from dawn until dusk. Mom would call us in when it was time to eat lunch, then again for dinner, and finally, when it was time to call it a night. If we were lucky enough to be allowed to stay out past 9 o’clock, we could usually be found behind my neighbor’s garage, marveling as lightning bugs danced around us.
We had all of the outdoor amenities: a jungle gym, croquet sets, softball equipment, Frisbees, tennis and basketball courts nearby, a neighbor with a tire swing in her backyard, and Barbie doll stations set up on our porches that were always ready to be played with in the event of rain. However, sometime during the summer of 1979, we realized we needed something more—a challenge. We needed to build something! Yes, we needed to put our energy and craftsmanship to the test. We decided to construct our own building, a “kids-only” space where we were in charge. After scouring the neighborhood for scrap wood, we formulated a plan to build the best fort we’d ever seen in my backyard. We found the perfect spot behind my garage, a good 30 yards from the house. Once a vegetable garden, it would now serve as our sovereign property.
At nine, we lacked some of the construction and engineering skills necessary to build a level—much less solid—structure, but we did the best that we could. We used the huge pieces of plywood and particleboard of varying lengths and widths that we’d scavenged, and a few two-by-fours with the nails still attached to them from their previous project. We found an old coffee can filled with nails and other hardware in the garage and “borrowed” my father’s hammers for the project. One day, my father came home from work to discover that we were using his tools without his permission. After a brief lecture about asking first, he gave us a hand with the fort. The end result was a structure that resembled a small shanty. With three and a half sides, a flat roof, and a dirt floor, it could easily accommodate about three of us at a time.
We were proud of ourselves for creating this structure. We played in it throughout the summer months, occasionally using it as a space to escape the hot sun and sometimes to eat our lunches. That summer, our fort served as a full-time residence for our Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls. We were convinced that they were happy there.
I knew other kids who had their own play spaces. One friend had an amazing tree house where we used to climb up and read our Battlestar Galactica magazines and Archie comic books. Another friend had a pop-up tent stationed on his lawn that we used as a getaway. One of my cousins had a huge garden shed behind her family’s dairy barn that we claimed as our “house” where we stored old pots and pans that we filled with grass and dirt. Not all of the forts in my life were outdoors, however. My younger brother was always making “indoor” forts using the couch and some chairs, along with blankets draped over the top to create his dwelling. My mother would often find him napping in these impromptu structures.
I have fond memories of all the forts and tree houses that I’ve encountered. To this day, when I see a huge cardboard box my mind goes immediately into “fort-mode,” and I think about what type of structure I could potentially make out of it for my young nephews. Driving through Rochester and its suburbs, I see all types of playhouses and forts, most of them professionally manufactured. I smile whenever I pass by one of them, remembering what it was like to be a kid and have a small place of my own in this big, big world. It was my space, and I liked it that way.
On view in the exhibition "Jo Davidson: Biographer in Bronze"
The National Portrait Gallery owns more than sixty of Jo Davidson’s portraits in bronze, marble, terra-cotta, and plaster, acquired over a number of years. Born in New York to Russian immigrant parents, Davidson struggled financially at the beginning of his career. But by the 1920s, his reputation as a leading portraitist in France, England, and the United States was secure, and later he became so well known that a photograph of his jovial, black-bearded countenance served as a clue in a crossword puzzle!
Jo Davidson’s charisma endeared him to many of his famous subjects. One of my favorites is our portrait of his contemporary, the sculptor and heiress Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), one of those charmed by Davidson, and one of his earliest patrons. Just after she had been introduced to Davidson in Paris in 1908, Whitney began to purchase his work and to correspond with him, arranging visits when she was in France. In 1909 she wrote, “I hope you come to America. It’s good to go and look around there once in a while . . . come and look at me! too.”
During the years just after his marriage in 1909, Davidson and his wife Yvonne, a designer of fashionable dresses, did live in New York, where Whitney found studio space for him in MacDougal Alley, near her own studio and the new Whitney Studio Club on West Eighth Street. In 1917, she made a bronze portrait of Davidson. But Davidson’s 1916 portrait of Whitney was not a friendly gift; it was commissioned in order to help Davidson financially.
The portrait is very like contemporary photographs of Whitney, with her deep-set eyes, narrow brow, and thick hair. Davidson was known for capturing a likeness quickly, and he imbued his sitters with a vivacity born from conversation. As he confessed, “I often wondered what it was that drove me to make busts of people. It wasn’t so much that they had faces that suggested sculpture. . . . [It] was the people themselves—to be with them, to hear them speak and watch their faces change.”
The portrait was produced in several versions. Whitney mentioned a plaster and a polychromed terra-cotta in her correspondence from 1916 and 1917. A marble is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Davidson owned two plasters, and perhaps a version of the terra-cotta bust. But no contemporary bronze is known.
In 1968, this particular bust was cast in bronze for the National Portrait Gallery, using a plaster that had remained in the Davidson family. It was cast by the Valsuani foundry in France, the foundry Davidson used during his lifetime. That we know this much about Davidson’s portrait (and there is still much that we do not know) is due to our ongoing research into his sculptural production, initiated in 1993, when we examined Davidson’s personal papers at the Library of Congress.
This research brought us into contact with Davidson’s surviving son, Jacques Davidson, who, although he has now passed away, lived in France, where Jo owned a house. Jacques, as charming as his father, had been in touch with the Gallery over the years. During a trip to America with his son, he visited the Gallery again and examined many of our sculptures, offering opinions and reminiscences, and adding to our knowledge of Jo’s work.
Jo Davidson and Whitney remained close until her death in 1942. They visited each other, traveled together, and corresponded. Whitney bought heaps of Yvonne’s designer dresses for herself and her daughters. In 1927, she wrote a long, philosophical letter to Davidson, which began, “Life is funny and you are wonderful.” Davidson’s sensitive portrait of Whitney expresses his relationship with a woman who was not only a fellow artist and his patron, but also his friend.
- Brandon Brame Fortune , Curator of Painting & Sculpture, National Portrait GalleryGertrude Vanderbilt Whitney / Jo Davidson / Bronze, 1968 cast after 1916 original / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Further reading: Davidson’s autobiography, Between Sittings (New
York, 1951), is full of anecdotes about his life and his sitters. For
an account of Davidson’s work, see Janis Conner and Joel Rosenkranz,
Rediscoveries in American Sculpture: Studio Works, 1893–1939
(Austin, Tex., 1989). The standard biography of Whitney, with
references to her friendship with Davidson, is B. H. Friedman, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (New York, 1978).
Anthony Wayne was one of those men who truly proved his mettle during wartime.
Among his memorable accomplishments was a victory that resulted from a most severe learning experience. In September 1777, Wayne's troops were bivouacked at Paoli, Pennsylvania, and fell victim to a well-executed nighttime bayonet assault.
In his history of the American Revolution, Patriot Battles, Michael Stephenson writes, “Of Wayne's 1,500 men, 13 percent (200) were killed and another 7 percent (100) wounded. . . . This was a most shocking inversion of the usual ratio of killed to wounded; in most battles it was about three wounded to every man killed.”
This lesson was not lost on Wayne; after suffering the horrors of the attack, he tucked away the strategy and saved it for another day and another place. When he finally brought the tactic out of his playbook it was July 16, 1779; the place was the British fort at Stony Point, New York, on the Hudson River. With stealth, Wayne's men approached the fort, under command to attack with bayonets only. The assault was precise and deadly, beginning in the late hours of July 15; the fort belonged to the Americans by early morning of July 16. Wayne had made up for the tragic duping at Paoli.
Wayne served with distinction in the American Revolution; after Stony Point he participated in the surrender at Yorktown and the removal of the British from Georgia. During George Washington's presidency, Wayne was made commander-in-chief of the new American army, during which tenure he fought and later negotiated peace with Indians of the Northwest Territory. This achievement is signified in Wayne’s portrait by George Graham, in which a peace pipe can be seen in the background; the papers on the table in the foreground are likely intended to be the treaty of peace signed at Fort Greeneville in 1795.
- Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery
For further reading: Michael Stephenson, Patriot Battles: How the War of Independence Was Fought (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).
Works for solo piano and for voice and string quartet, performed by pianist Louis Schwizgebel-Wang, soprano Mary Elizabeth Mackenzie, and musicians from Ravinia’s Steans Institute.
- Brahms: Two Rhapsodies, Op. 79
- Schoenberg: String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10
With lush harmony and passionate, singing melody, the Brahms’ Rhapsodies are textbook examples of the mature Romantic style. As the Romantic era progressed, composers began pushing the harmonic envelope further, and that late Romantic language is typified and further extended by Schoenberg’s Quartet No. 2. The first and second movements exhibit that late Romantic practice of stretching tonality, but they are fairly idiomatic for the time period. It is in the final movement that the real change comes. There is no key signature; the harmonies roam freely across the chromatic scale, in what is considered by many to be the composer’s first real experiment with atonality. It would be a little more than a decade before Schoenberg introduced his 12-tone system, but there is a sense that, with this quartet, the path of modern music has been irrevocably altered.
Recorded live in the Tapestry Room of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is pleased to share this concert under a Creative Commons Music Sharing License. For details see www.gardnermuseum.org.
