#Tompkins Harrison Matteson

[uwmspeccoll]

Wood Engraving Wednesday

ALEXANDER ANDERSON

Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) is well-known for popularizing the wood engraving for book illustration in Great Britain and Alexander Anderson (1775-1870) is his American counterpart as one of the earliest of American wood engravers. He trained and worked as a physician and was self-taught as an engraver. By 1820 he committed himself entirely to illustrating books with wood engravings.

Shown here are wood engravings from the 1848 biography The Life of Benjamin Franklin by O. L. Holley, published in New York by educational book publisher George F. Cooledge & Brother. The engraved title page was engraved by Anderson from an illustration by American artist Tompkins Harrison Matteson (1813-1884). The remainder of the illustrations in the book were engraved by Anderson from illustrations by Anderson's student and frequent collaborator William Penn Morgan (active 1811-1872).

View another post with illustrations by Alexander Anderson.

View more posts with wood engravings!

[daydreambeauty]

Tompkins Harrison Matteson, “The Trial of George Jacobs, 5th August 1692” , 1855, Oil on Canvas.

[jamieroxxartist]

*A very good reason to have that whole Separation of Church and State… You know we tried it the religious way… and people started getting hung and burned alive.  So yeah, keep that religion in the church and/or temple and out of government…

Today in History: Mar. 1, 1692 – Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne and Tituba are brought before local magistrates in Salem Village, Massachusetts, beginning what would become known as the Salem witch trials.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials)

*Painting: ‘Trial of George Jacobs of Salem for witchcraft’ by Matteson, Tompkins Harrison, 1813-1884

[salem-project2023]

The Trial of George Jacobs, Sr. for Witchcraft.

By Tompkins Harrison Matteson, 1855. Oil on canvas. Gift of R. W. Ropes, 1859. 1246.

Found at the Peabody Essex Museum.

[artdaily7]

LoveSpell: Against Endings by Erica Jong

All the endings in my life rise up against me like that sea of troubles Shakespeare mixed with metaphors; like Vikings in their boats singing Wagner, like witches burning at the stake-- I submit to my fate.

I know beginnings, their sweetnesses, and endings, their bitternesses-- but I do not know continuance-- I do not know the sweet demi-boredom of life as it lingers, of man and wife regarding each other across a table of shared witnesses, of the hand-in-hand dreams of those who have slept a half-century together in a bed so used and familiar it is rutted with love.

I would know that before this life closes, a soulmate to share my roses-- I would make a spell with long grey beard hairs and powdered rosemary and rue, with the jacket of a tux for a tall man with broad shoulders, who loves to dance; with one blue contact lens for his bluest eyes; with honey in a jar for his love of me; with salt in a dish for his love of sex and skin; with crushed rose petals for our bed; with tubes of cerulean blue and vermilion and rose madder for his artist's eye; with a dented Land-Rover fender for his love of travel; with a poem by Blake for his love of innocence revealed by experience; with soft rain and a bare head; with hand-in-hand dreams on Mondays and the land of fuck on Sundays; with mangoes, papayas and limes, and a house towering above the sea.

Muse, I surrender to thee.

Thy will be done, not mine.

If this love spell pleases you, send me this lover, this husband, this dancing partner for my empty bed and let him fill me from now until I die.

I offer my bones, my poems, my luck with roses, and the secret garden I have found walled in my center, and the sunflower who raises her head despite her heavy seeds.

I am ready now, Muse, to serve you faithfully even with a graceful dancing partner-- for I have learned to stand alone.

Give me your blessing.

Let the next epithalamion I write be my own.

And let it last more than the years of my life-- and without the least strain-- two lovers bareheaded in a summer rain.

Tompkins Harrison Matteson 1853 Examination of a Witch, oil on canvas, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, USA

[marquislaffytaffy]

Lafayette in Prison at Olmütz, 1795-97 -  Tompkins Harrison Matteson, 1850

[artandhumanrights]

“The Last of the Race”, 1946, Tompkins Harrison Matteson (1813-1884), New York Historical Society, New York

This painting was perhaps done as a counterpoint to the colonial and racist arrogance of “Manifest Destiny”, the inexorable expansion of white, Christian America to the West Coast, invading and eventually defeating Native Americans (and Mexicans) along the way. The term, “manifest destiny”, was coined in 1845, only a year before this painting, denoting the presumed God-given right (and duty) of Americans to seize the continent.

Matteson’s title betrays a common settler chauvinism, the presumption that the native race would simply disappear. It has also been suggested that this type of picture, that of a “doomed Indian”, helped to assuage collective guilt by somehow suggesting their demise as inevitable.

Nevertheless, this painting recognised that the land wasn’t bequeathed to Americans by some deity but was stolen from others. This family has an air of dignity, though a defeated and perhaps cliched dignity given they have been driven to the edge of the continent. At least Matteson recognised dignity at a time when most Americans saw a presumed lack of civilisation. And the painting acknowledges the human cost of Manifest Destiny at a time when most Americans received the idea euphorically and without question.

[eucanthos]

 Tompkins Harrison Matteson: Examination of a Witch (detail), 1853

One of the worst mass hysteria events in American history, the Salem Witch Trials. Reckoning With—and Reclaiming—the Salem Witch Trials. A 2021 exhibition, smithsonianmag the-salem-witch-trials-history-art-colonial-witchcraft

The infamous Salem Witch Trials began during the spring of 1692, after a group of young girls in Salem Village, Massachusetts, claimed to be possessed by the devil and accused several local women of witchcraft. A special court convened in Salem to hear the cases convicted, Bridget Bishop, hanged that June. Eighteen others followed Bishop to Salem’s Gallows Hill, while some 150 more men, women and children were accused over the next several months. - https://www.history.com/topics/colonial-america/salem-witch-trials

According to Silvia Federici, witch-hunting is not only alive and well but enjoying a resurgence and it has everything to do with capitalism, and always has. -.randomlengthsnews 2022/03/18/witches-women

The six essays that comprise Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women are breezy enough (academically, at least) to fit the bill, while at the same time expanding her scope to indict neoliberalism as a fomenter of modern-day witch hunts.

Federici points to pre-Reformation England and the creation of enclosures, “whereby landlords and well-to-do peasants fenced off the common lands, putting an end to customary rights and evicting the population of farmers and squatters that depended on them for survival,” as an earliest example of these capitalist relations. “In all its forms this was a violent process, causing a profound polarization in what had previously been communities structured by reciprocal bonds.”

In 2004’s Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (PDF), Federici plumbs the depths of witch-hunting as a response to resistance against nascent capitalism. - Book Review — Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women, 2022

[pwlanier]

Tompkins Harrison Matteson (1813 - 1884)

James Fenimore Cooper (1789 - 1851)

THE TURKEY SHOOT 1857

Fenimore Art Museum

[met-american-paintings]

Scene from Literature (from McGuire Scapbook), Tompkins Harrison Matteson, American Paintings and Sculpture

Gift of James C. McGuire, 1926 Size: 5 3/8 x 4 15/16 in. (13.7 x 12.5 cm) Medium: Graphite on off-white wove paper

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/11522

[raincrowstudios-official]

A Witch’s Mark or a Devil’s mark was the imprint of the Devil’s initials on a witch using his claws or a hot iron. During witch trials in the 1600s, the practice of “pricking a witch” came about where witches had pins driven into old scars or calluses to find an area free of pain that proved a communion with the devil.

Painting -  "Examination of a witch" by Tompkins Harrison Matteson (1853)

[yo-sostenible]

Caza de brujas: cómo la paranoia colectiva dejó 40.000 muertes en la Europa de las hogueras

En enero, el Parlament decidió reivindicar a las mujeres ejecutadas por brujería en los albores de la modernidad, cuando el Viejo Continente sucumbió a la creencia en una conjura satánica. ¿Cómo pudo suceder? Interpretaciones feministas, sociológicas, religiosas y antropológicas tratan de entender aquel frenesí de persecuciones. Examen de una bruja. Tompkins Harrison Matteson, 1853. / Wikimedia…

[marquisdelaughingette]

Lafayette in Prison at Olmütz, 1795-97 by Tompkins Harrison Matteson  (1850) Lafayette College Art Collection Both Gilbert and Adrienne are looking in rather better shape here than they were for most of their imprisonment (Lafayette is even sporting some rather stylish clothes, even if he’s cravatless, and has a lot more hair). 

[jamieroxxartist]

*A very good reason to have that whole Separation of Church and State… You know we tried it the religious way... and people started getting hung and burned alive.  So yeah, keep that religion in the church and/or temple and out of government...

Today in History: Mar. 1, 1692 – Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne and Tituba are brought before local magistrates in Salem Village, Massachusetts, beginning what would become known as the Salem witch trials.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials)

*Painting: 'Trial of George Jacobs of Salem for witchcraft' by Matteson, Tompkins Harrison, 1813-1884

[rcox808]

Tompkins Harrison Matteson (1813-1884) Playing in the Snow 1856

[artdaily7]

Now you will feel no rain A traditional Apache song Now you will feel no rain, for each of you will be a shelter to the other. Now you will feel no cold, for each of you will be warmth to the other. Now there is no loneliness for you; now there is no loneliness. Now you are two bodies, but there is only one life before you. Go now to your dwelling place, to enter into your days together. And may your days be good and long on this earth. Tompkins Harrison Matteson 1847 The Last of the Race, oil on canvas, Collection of the New-York Historical Society, USA