Art for All

Art makes life, makes interest, makes importance - Henry James

When we commenced this first century of our national existence, we were newly emancipated colonies whose richest possession was a God-given love of liberty. We are at present one of the great powers of the earth, and have reason for well-justified pride in the history of the hundred years which have now so nearly elapsed. We have sent ships into the uttermost parts of the world, and by commerce have increased in wealth; we have manned great fleets, and have equipped great and heroic armies; we have intersected the vast area of our territory with a net-work of iron, and have brought its farthest extremities into possibility of instant communication; we have built countless cities, and enriched them with every kind of useful and charitable institution, and have gained for ourselves a world-wide reputation in science and in literature. All this and more, for we have given to the world examples of men in power whose reputation is unstained by any shadow of self-seeking ambition, and of men in private life whose overflowing charity has won for them the love and admiration of mankind. These are great things, some of them the greatest things which a nation can do. And yet it seems to me, that we can hardly arrogate to our country the title of the model republic so long as we are content to live without art, which both in ancient and in modern times has been regarded by all civilized nations as one of the crowning glories of a great state, and neglect all means for the cultivation of an appreciation of its beauties. — C. C. Perkins.

Charles Callahan Perkins was a true amateur - he loved the arts. He had considerable talents; he could paint and engrave and he could compose and conduct music, but he was torn between his talents, and perhaps he would never, with his great wealth, be able to feel the suffering a great artist so often requires. With his enthusiasms however, and his ability to collect and patronize and endow, Charles discovered a great role to play with his life.

All around him in Tuscany he found sculpture created by the old masters going back to the thirteenth century. It was the finest sculpture the world had known since classical times, but its history had never been adequately recorded. C. C. Perkins researched, wrote, and engraved the illustrations to The Tuscan Sculptors, in 1864. The book was immediately recognized as the standard authority on the subject. He continued this work in 1868 with The Italian Sculptors, a history of the art in the other Italian cities during the same period. In 1869, in recognition for his contributions, he became the first American elected to the Academe des Beaux Arts in Paris.

With two young sons and a teenage daughter, the time came for the Perkins family to return to Boston in 1869. They moved into the family’s Oakwood house on Jamaica Pond, next door to sister Sarah Cleveland’s new stick wood style Nutwood, and up the embankment from the Queen Anne Revival Pine Bank that brother Ned was having built on cousin John Hubbard Sturgis’s design, following the disastrous fire that had destroyed Pine Bank II the previous year. The pond provided excellent skating in the winter and sailing in the summer, and an abundant supply of good company in the generous houses found around its shores.

For a summer home Charles’s wife Fanny and her mother Mary Anne Bruen purchased a cornfield on Bellevue Avenue in Newport and worked to recreate the grand style they had lived in Florence. They planted beautiful trees all around the property, and built a relatively modern stone summer cottage, Villa Bruen, in the Gothic Revival style with large porches to catch the breezes off the ocean.

Longfellow invited Charles to join the Saturday Club which met every month at the Parker House. As Oliver Wendell Holmes explained it, the Saturday Club had no organization, and seemed to have sprung to life fully clothed as it were, almost without parentage. It was natural that men such as Emerson, Longfellow, Agassiz, Hawthorne, Motley, and Sumner should meet and dine together as they did, in fact, every month. The club had no constitution or by-laws, made no speeches, read no papers, observed no ceremonies. Its members came and went at their pleasure. There was nothing Bohemian about the club, but it certainly provided many good times and not a little good talking.

Charles and Fanny entertained at both Oakwood and Villa Bruen, frequently sponsoring concerts and recitals. They attended Harriet Beecher Stowe’s birthday party, and continued to correspond with Julia Ward Howe, Matthew Arnold, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the Brownings.

There was no question Charles had come into his own on the European continent as an art historian and a connoisseur. His next career was to become one of the great evangelists of art and culture to America.