Tuscan Spring

“You know, I suppose, the Charles Perkinses – with whom I lately spent an evening. Mrs. P. is spicy, and Mr. P. – sugary shall I say? – no, full of sweetness and light – especially sweetness.”
- Henry James

Charles Callahan Perkins was a young man in a hurry. As a sophomore he left Harvard in the spring before exams were complete and wanted to skip right to his senior year. He had a lot of enthusiasms, but his academic career was mediocre; he couldn’t wait to get out of college and go to Europe.

Going abroad at that time was thought by most to be self-indulgence; Art was regarded as a mere will-o'-the-wisp. An artist was considered by many to be a man who had taken to Art because he was fit for nothing better. Such attitudes didn’t deter Charles; as soon as he finished his course of studies, and gained some notice in music and art and graduated in 1843, Charles sailed for Europe. He had nothing holding him in Boston; he was fabulously wealthy, his mother was in New Jersey, and there was no “culture” in America.

Charles headed first to Rome, where he became the constant companion of the young sculptor Thomas Crawford, one of the first Americans to try his hand at carving sculpture. Crawford was working on his statue of Hebe and Ganymede, and struggling against poverty. Charles was never challenged by the need to make money, but rather by how to spend his wealth and spread his affections. He acquired Hebe and Ganymede, and eventually gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts back in Boston, and his warm support lifted Crawford out of his depression.

Charles headed to Paris where he indulged his enthusiasm for music. The opera, the conservatory, and the chamber concerts of Paris quickened his love and knowledge of music. He began to compose, and wrote several melodies and a few more serious works, some of which were performed to the acceptance of the Parisian critics. The Gazette de la France Musicale recognized him as a composer of some "grand symphonic works", and praised a number of his works, particularly the charming L'Excelsior which set his friend Longfellow's poem to music, (with versions in both English and French), but the critics also suggested that the young artist needed to make a choice between music and painting.

For most of the next twenty-five years, Europe was Charles’s home. He was passionate about all the arts. He studied painting in Paris with Ary Scheffer, a “frigidly classical” painter, mainly of the type of religious themes which showed up on Sunday School publications of the 1950’s. CC bought several of Scheffer’s paintings, and exhibited Scheffer’s Christus Consolator at the Athenaeum in 1852 (it showed up in a rural Minnesota church in 2007).

He travelled to Leipzig, where he studied the history of Christian art, and then returned to Paris where he learned the art of etching. Felix Bracquemond was friends with Millet and Corot, Degas and Rodin, had learned the trade of lithography as a youth, and then learned etching and engraving and played a major role in the revival of those arts. He instructed Charles in these arts, which he would use with his characteristic enthusiasm.

Charles returned briefly to Boston in 1849, where he founded and sometimes conducted the Handel and Hayden Society, then returned to Europe in 1851, to Leipzig, continuing his music studies. He travelled through Spain and sketched the countryside, and wrote about the museums he visited, the Alhambra, architecture, and military movements during the insurrection in Madrid in 1854.

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Back again in Boston, Charles married Frances Davenport Bruen on June 12, 1855.

Fanny was the daughter of the Reverend Matthias Bruen, who had served as a missionary to the "saloon sodden wilderness" of Greenwich Village, and had gathered a flock of 10 souls together as the Bleeker Street Presbyterian Church, which eventually grew into today’s Broadway Presbyterian Church. Reverend Bruen died in 1829 when Fanny was only four, so she was raised by her mother Mary Ann Davenport (1793-1892) and her grandfather Matthias Bruen, the Perth Amboy tea merchant who was an enthusiastic collector of books, particularly early bibles and books of hours, and one of the richest men in America.

Within a year, Charles and Fanny had produced a beautiful daughter Eleanor, and the following year they returned to settle in Florence with Fanny’s mother Mary Ann and sister in tow. Two sons were born in Florence, Edward Clifford (1858), and Charles Bruen (1860).

Elizabeth Barrett Browning stayed in close touch from Rome, writing Mary Ann with concerns over the narrow escape of Charles’s brother Ned and sister Sarah and their mother from Perugia, and looked forward to joining them in Florence.

My dear Mrs. Bruen,
I do want to have a good happy letter from you this time about Mrs. Perkins. Pray tell me that she makes you all happy, & that the baby continues in its former prosperity. Your letter quite shocked me—for I had not realized to myself there having been so much danger & anguish among you though I had heard of illness. Shall you decide on leaving Italy for the summer, I wonder? Or will you go to Lucca as usual? I suppose we may say of the winter it is past; & yet we had such a return of gloom and chill (even in Rome) when we said so weeks ago that it requires courage to affirm anything. I had begun to go out, & was forced to leave it off. Only, the warmth during the last three or four days has been re-assuring. We shall be slow in returning to Florence, having, like slow snails, a house on our backs till June. But I mean to try to return before May is out. Our plans afterward are very uncertain. The more repose for me, the better I believe—even from good words & …works, perhaps. . .
Give my love to dear Mrs. Perkins, Miss Bruen—all of you. Let me have a word of good news if possible.

Affectionately yours, Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Charles bought the Villa Capponi. The house, with its famous gardens and stunning view of Florence from the hills of Arcetri, (much admired in later years by Edith Wharton), was an old fortified farmhouse dating from the 14th century on a southern hillside overlooking the Arno valley. Surrounded by steep slopes of vineyards and olive groves, it has that Tuscan combination of architectural refinement within an ordered agricultural setting which exudes an air of dignity and domestic repose.

Charles sketched, painted watercolors, and etched. Mostly, he collected. He collected old masters, etchings, Tuscan sculpture; the 14th century head of a pope, an etching by Donatello, a head of Christ by della Robbia, a cast bronze coin by Pisanello; he bought a sword that had apparently been made for his ancestor Edmund Perkins in 1630; he bought a grey horse named Beppo in Venice to ride over the alps to Geneva.

Charles and Fanny entertained widely. At their home many recitals and concerts were given. They corresponded with Matthew Arnold, Longfellow, Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Julia Ward Howe. With Charles’s enthusiasm for art and music, and his wealth, he could go as far as his talent could take him. He drank the culture in as deeply as he possibly could; he was living a long way from gray old Boston.

Big Sister

Sarah Paine Perkins, the second child of James Perkins Jr and Eliza Green Perkins was named after her grandmother Perkins, and was always very close to her. Sarah was born in 1818 and was brought up at Pine Bank where the family moved after the Pearl Street mansion was given to the Athenaeum, and her grandfather died. Her older brother James died in 1824 when she was six, and her father passed away in 1828 when she was ten, and then her mother married Bishop Doane and moved to New Jersey, so Sarah stayed on where she was most comfortable, at Pine Bank with her grandmother and her younger brothers Ned and Charlie and Hal.

When she turned twenty she married a young man ten years her senior with literary inclinations. Henry Russell Cleveland had graduated from Harvard in 1827, was known to have clear judgment, a lively fancy, and an almost instinctive elegance of taste, and particularly enjoyed the English poets and the great Latin writers.

Henry had always been of delicate health, and after college he had headed west on the new canal to Geneseo where he had helped start an academy for boys. In Geneseo he contracted a fever, perhaps malaria, and almost died. His father was Vice-Consul in Havana so he visited Cuba in 1830, hoping the travel would help his health. He then travelled on to Europe; to England in 1831, and then on to Paris where he became private secretary to the American minister Rives and also secretary to the American Polish Committee where he became acquainted with Lafayette. He continued on to Geneva, and then to Florence, Rome, and Naples. When he finally returned to America in 1833 he became a proctor at Harvard. He certainly had literary inclinations, but, thinking practically, he started an academy in Boston and resumed his teaching career, documenting his methods in his book “Remarks on the Classical Education of Boys” (1834).

Henry formed an informal social group (a "mutual admiration society" in the words of one critic) called the Five of Clubs, which included the law partners Charles Sumner and George Hillard, the classicist Cornelius Felton, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The five young men met together at Pine Bank on Saturday afternoons, and talked of society and experiences and books and travels. They reviewed each others works and helped launch each others careers.

When he married Sarah in 1838, Henry's life changed. The marriage settlement stipulated that of her inheritance from her father, $30,000 would be paid to Henry as his own property. Beyond that sum, the inheritance would be given over to a trust, with the income to benefit Sarah free from the control of any husband. Soon after the marriage, he suffered an attack by a kind of nervous fever, which hung about him for some weeks, and he stopped teaching. He soon realized that his retiring habits and the delicacy of his organization gave him a strong preference for that "Domestic life, in rural leisure passed," which the poet Cowper pronounced to be so favorable to virtue and happiness.

From this period on the course of his life became placid and uneventful as, with the exception of a winter spent in Boston, a few months in Cambridge, and occasional visits to his wife's mother in New Jersey, he resided at the beautiful estate of Pine Bank.

His occupations were almost exclusively literary, though no inconsiderable portion of his time was devoted to the duties of a wide and generous hospitality. His friends long associated his smile of welcome and the cordial pressure of his hand with the breezy lawns of Pine Bank, the beautiful belt of trees which skirts its borders, its winding walks, and gentle waves that die away on its pebbled shore.

Henry's brother Horace had just returned from the "dream-land" of the west, and moved into Pine Bank as well. Horace joined into the literary activities of the Five of Clubs, and eventually went on to become one of America's first landscape architects and an associate of Frederick Law Olmsted (who would eventually turn Pine Bank into part of Boston's "Emerald Necklace"). Ralph Waldo Emerson hired Horace Cleveland to design Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, and then Horace returned west, to his "dream-land", where with a nod to his friendship to Longfellow and the Song of Hiawatha, he developed the Minneapolis park system including Minnehaha Park.

When her grandmother died in 1841, and with her mother in New Jersey with her second family, Sarah had to take care of her brothers. Charles had been suspended from Harvard in 1841 for leaving at the end of the term without permission and without passing his exams, and Sarah had to write to Longfellow to intercede with President Josiah Quincy to have Charlie reinstated. Her youngest brother Hal was expelled from Harvard for good in October 1842. She tried to help him become a farmer, but Hal, like his father, couldn't escaped his alcohol addiction and died young at the age of 25. She even took care of her mother when Bishop Doane got into severe financial distress because of the mortgages he had signed (along with funds from Charlie and Ned) made to found schools in New Jersey.

Her husband Henry Cleveland was never well. In 1841 he traveled on horseback with Charlie west through Greenfield, Charlemont, North Adams, and Williamstown, to Troy, and then back to Boston, but he developed a cough which stayed with him and made the trip uncomfortable for all. The following year he tried going back to Cuba and the Caribbean, and sailed to Bonaire, using the trip for his literary pursuits:

"I have studied Sales's Spanish Grammar entirely through, with care and attention, performing all the exercises twice; I have translated four books of Telemaque from the French into Spanish, carefully correcting my work by a Spanish translation; I have studied critically, and reviewed with care, two plays of Calderon, occupying two hundred pages; and in the same careful manner have studied through, three or four times, a volume of poetry, by Espronceda, a modern Spanish poet, the volume containing about three hundred pages. I have read Alison's History of the French Revolution, four volumes of Addison's works, all Byron's dramatic works, Dana's " Two Years Before the Mast," McKenzie's " Paul Jones," and Commodore Perry; besides a whole rabble rout of novels, tales, poems, romances, reviews, magazines, and newspapers, too numerous to be catalogued."

In May he took a steamboat for St. Louis, but his cough got progressively worse, and when he arrived he was carried to a hotel. He was feverish and bleeding from his lungs. Sarah and Charles had been summoned, and arrived in early June just in time to be with him as the last rites were administered. He died June 12th, 1843. The last words he spoke, addressed to his wife, were, "Whatever happens, we must trust in God."

Sarah returned to Pine Bank. Charlie took off to join Ned in Europe. Pine Bank seemed awfully big. Five years later, when Ned got engaged to Mary Spring, Sarah decided to give him the house.

She lived with Charlie at Oakwood on the north shore of the pond until she built her own house, Nutwood, in 1867, next door on the corner of Chestnut and Perkins Streets.

Sarah stayed in touch with Longfellow, and gave a complete set of Shakespeare to her favorite nephew Teddy when he married Edith Wharton in 1885. Sarah Paine Perkins Cleveland died, fifty years after her huband, in 1893.

Both sides of Chestnut Street on the Boston side were Perkins land until the area on the Ward's Pond side was sold to the Jamaica Plain Aqueduct Company to become parkland in the 1890's. Oakwood and Nutwood stood until the early 1970's when they became part of the Cabot Estate Condominiums and were demolished.

Pine Bank

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow fondly remembered Ned Perkins' wedding to Mary Spring. In the evening of June 10th, 1846, all the society of Boston drove out to the Perkins family country house Pine Bank on Jamaica Pond, where the Perkins gave a superb Fête Champêtre:

The evening, the blue lake, the boat with its white sail; the music, the dance on the greensward; the broad spreading tent, like a morning glory inverted, the well dressed crowd, the gleam of lamps through the gathering twilight, the young bride led by the white haired Mr. Otis, and then the fireworks, and as they drove away, the broad moon rose over the trees. . .

Ned inherited his mother’s loveliness and amiable manner. He was both attractive and gracious, and won friends among all sorts of men. Enthusiastic, even ardent, but perfectly simple, eager to enjoy, and as eager that others should enjoy what he did, he was a delightful companion.

He was the grandson of one of the richest men in America and had no reason or need to take up an “occupation”. Ned, a lover of books like his grandfather James, was a benefactor of the Athenaeum, for which he helped purchase part of George Washington's personal library. Longfellow shared his bibliophilia and invited Ned to join the Saturday Club. Without children of his own, he became a faithful, active trustee of St. Paul's School in 1862, where he was remembered for his constant punning and devising the school’s emblem of a pelican piercing its breast to feed its young with its own blood. He was a trustee of the Perkins Institute for the Blind, and built an exquisite chapel in Northeast Harbor on his half-brother Bishop Doane’s property.

Those who knew him best thought the most of him. They appreciated his sweetness of disposition, his sense of honor, his purity, his desire to live uprightly and generously. Not blind to his defects, or dreaming that his nature had reached or closely approached maturity, his kindred and intimate friends thought him, and had every reason to think him, one of the most promising of young men.

After his marriage to Mary in 1848, Ned tore the original country house at Pine Bank down and built a year-round house. Pine Bank II was a substantial three-storied affair with mansard roof by a French architect, Jean Lemoulnier, which faced the Pond with a small terrace and balconied front entrance with fancy grillwork along the roofline.

Twenty years later, on the 10th of February, 1868 a housemaid kindled the fire in Mary's bedroom to be ready for her return from Boston. A chimney caught fire and burned furiously in the afternoon, but burned itself out.

When Mary and Edward returned early in the evening, they heard from the servants what had occurred, and carefully examined the rooms where the chimney passed and all seemed perfectly right, no smell or smoke or undue heat to be anywhere. The poor darlings being tired after a town day, took a little repose on the sofa, and Edward fell asleep. He was woken by a muffled explosion, and rushing to the window as he rushed upstairs, the glare of a large glow shone out from the burning roof and was reflected on the white lawn of snow.

The brick-work of the chimney must have cracked and opened during its burning, and burning embers must have dropped into the woodwork. Within 10 minutes all hope of saving the house had vanished. It was 7: 30 P. M. and the neighbors were all at their various homes and came so promptly, rich and poor, that all the furniture of second and lower stories, and all the books, pictures, the portraits of James and Sarah, bas-reliefs, even the chandeliers and several marble fire places were saved by their energy and kindness.

The night was very cold and very slippery. Later some rowdy men came and stole some things and many clothes, and as Pine Bank smoldered firemen emptied the superb wine cellar and consumed some excellent claret while tending the smoking ruins.

Ned started all over again on the still useable foundation. He had his cousin John Hubbard Sturgis design Pine Bank III, instructing him, "I want a house of moderate costs and dimensions". What he built was Gothic in red brick and imported English tan terracotta - a theme he had Sturgis repeat for the new Museum of Fine Arts built the following year at Copley Square (where the Copley Plaza Hotel now stands).

Frederick Law Olmstead had started work on Boston’s Emerald Necklace park system in 1878. Mary died at Pine Bank in 1882 at age 58. By then, commercial ice houses were taking over the pond, and a movement arose to protect the open space. In 1892, the City of Boston created Jamaica Park and tore down the houses on the pond. The only house left was Pine Bank, when it was decided to use it as a refectory for those visiting the park.

Ned removed the fireplace mantels and stained-glass windows, and went to live out his last years down the street with his niece Mrs. Cleveland in her house Nutwood, where, after three years of mental depression, he died in 1899.

“His wealth gave him the liberty to do as he pleased, but his nature drew him irresistibly to beauty and to service.”