William Morgan: A small shop sends me onto some trails of history
Consider this my $5 history lesson, or a ticket down the rabbit hole.
The White Whale, a delightfully cluttered shop in Hudson, N.Y., is one of my favorites along the mile-long row of antique emporiums that forms Warren Street. Even though Hudson became a very popular home for New York émigrés during COVID, earning it the nickname of “Brooklyn North,” the various whale-themed places recalls Hudson’s founding as a port by Nantucket whalers fleeing the Royal Navy during the American Revolution. I bought this Camden, Maine, harbor scene by the Cape Ann painter Frederick W. Smith at the White Whale.
Frederick W. Smith (1885-1967?), Camden Harbor
Not really being a collector, I tend to look for smaller items, such as postcards and photographs, which despite their diminutive size, have larger stories to tell. On our last trip to Hudson, I paid $5 for a bookplate. The woodblock print of woodland, stream, and windmill once identified a tome from the library of R. Percy Alden.
Clearly someone with New England roots, Robert Percy Alden (1848-1909) was unknown to me. He apparently went into the lumber business and built an English-style manor house in Cornwall, Penn., in 1881. That his architect was Stanford White, fresh from apprenticing with Henry Hobson Richardson in Boston and before he joined with Charles McKim and William Rutherford Mead to form the Gilded Age’s most important architectural firm, suggests that Alden was both well-connected and aspirational.
Percy’s wife, Mary Ida Warren, whom he married in Paris, died at the age of 46 when a candle set her bed clothes on fire. Villa Alden’s last public appearance was as the set for a 2001 slasher film called WatchUsDie. Today, the house is a wedding venue.
Alden Villa, Cornwall, Penn., 1881
The artist of the bookplate is identified only by initials, J.A.W. Given the familial connections of a certain caste of New Englanders, I am assigning the design to the famous turn-of-the-century landscape painter Julian Alden Weir (1852-1919). The bookplate turns up in a New York bookseller’s catalogue, in Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, or The Ecclesiastical History of New England, printed in 1702, and for sale for $8,500. Before Alden, the book had been owned by Robert Weir, a Hudson River School painter mostly known for his monumental mural “Embarkation of the Pilgrims,” in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. Weir was a professor at the U.S. Military Academy, and both his son Julian and Percy Alden were born in West Point.
The younger Weir had two farms in Connecticut, one in Branchville, near Ridgefield, and the other in Windham, places where he gathered such fellow artists as John Henry Twachtman and William Lathrop.
One presumes that the scene in the bookplate is in Branchville, where Weir and Twachtman spent a summer perfecting woodblock engraving. William Lathrop was the figurehead of the artists’ colony in New Hope, in Bucks County, Penn., and the leading practitioner of Pennsylvania Impressionism. Lathrop’s son, a flyer in World War I and founder of a private boarding school called Solebury, was named Julian. His grandson, also Julian, a bookstore owner in New Hope, Penn., is the son of the Finnish-American sculptor Karl Karhumaa, a professor at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
The Percy, a home style offered by Alden Homes in Lebanon, Penn.
William Morgan is the author of, among other books, Academia: Collegiate Gothic Architecture in the United States, Monadnock Summer and The Cape Cod Cottage (which will be published next month). He grew up in Bucks County, Penn., and is an alumnus of the Solebury School.