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.