Tag: National Academy of Design

Harriet Agate Carmichael – Artist

“A Lady of the Agate Family”
 Family legend has that this is a portrait of Harriet, painted by her older brother Frederick Agate  c. 1830s 
Courtesy of the New York Historical Society

Harriet Agate Carmichael
1817 – 1871

Artist
***Local Connection: 2 Liberty Street***

2 Liberty Street, Ossining, c. 2024
Built c. 1820 by Harriet’s father Thomas Agate, 
the home is still standing and still occupied today.

One of three artistic siblings, Harriet Agate was born in Sparta in 1817. (Today Sparta is part of the Village of Ossining.)

In 1833, Harriet was one of the first women invited to show a painting at the National Academy of Design’s annual Art Exhibition. That painting was called “A View of Sleepy Hollow,” and was exhibited at the Eight Annual Exhibition, held at Clinton Hall, Beekman Street from May 14 – August 20, 1833.

While it cannot currently be proven, I have a hunch that the painting below could be the one Harriet Agate showed at the 1833 National Academy of Design’s Art Exhibition.  
Hers was titled “A View of Sleepy Hollow.”

“View of Sleepy Hollow”
c. 1834 – 1867
Unknown artist
Courtesy of Historic Hudson Valley

There are only two surviving paintings known to be by Harriet:

Still Life with Apples
By Harriet Agate, c. 1830
Courtesy of the Ossining Historical Society and Museum
At the Monument of Lysicrates
Oil painting on board by Harriet Agate, c. 1830
Courtesy of the Newark Museum of Art

When the Newark Art Museum accepted this painting in 1959, curator William H. Gerdts wrote the following notes: 

It is an almost primitive painting, most interesting from a general cultural point of view . . . It shows a Greek soldier in costume lying on the ground with a Greek woman, also in native costume, next to him.  A big Greek monument is in the centre behind him (Choragic Monument of Lysikrates I think.) Now, the subject of the picture is not known, but from the figures in it and from the time it was painted (it looks circa 1820 to 1830) I am sure it is a provincial American expression of sympathy with the Greek revolution —  same time as Lord Byron’s [poem entitled “January 22, Missolonghi”] and Delacroix’s “Greek Expiring on the Ruins of Missalonghi” . . . but it is a relatively rare to see this in American art.

It is noteworthy that the people depicted in “At the Monument of Lysicrates” look particularly awkward – an indicator perhaps of the limitations placed on women artists at that time.  Women would not have been allowed to take figure drawing classes, as viewing nude models would have been considered decidedly inappropriate.

This painting was included in a 1965 exhibit at the Newark Art Museum on “Women Artists of America, 1707 to 1964.”

Harriet’s two paintings and many of her brothers’ (Frederick and Alfred Agate) had been carefully kept in the attics of Agate family descendants (first in the Liberty Street house and then in another on Agate Avenue) until 1959 when Harriet’s great granddaughter, Melodia Carmichael Wood Ferguson, would discover them and give them to the Ossining Historical Society.  Most were then donated to the New-York Historical Society and the Newark Art Museum, where they are not on public view but are safely stored in climate-controlled warehouses. 

Around 1837, Harriet married Thomas J. Carmichael, a contractor for the Sing Sing portion of the Croton Aqueduct. They lived with her mother in the Agate family house at 2 Liberty Street. Harriet’s husband may have also contracted with Sing Sing Prison, then called Mount Pleasant State Prison, to use inmate labor for his stone cutting business.

Unfortunately, as was proper for women of the time, Harriet mostly seems to have lived in the shadows of the men in her life.  All we have are these two paintings, the possible portrait painted by her brother Frederick, some deeds of property sales, and a few mentions of her in the biographies of her artist brothers.  We don’t know if she continued painting, or if the responsibilities of motherhood and the pressure of societal norms caused her to abandon the pursuit of her art altogether.

We do, however, have this delightful silhouette of the couple:

Silhouette of Harriet and Thomas Carmichael
Made by Auguste Edouart, 1843
Handwritten caption reads:
Mr. and Mrs. Thomas J. Carmichael of Sing Sing, 
Mount pleasant, Westernchester [sic] Co.
Saratoga Springs, 6th August 1843
Courtesy of a private owner

Harriet would have five children and move to Wisconsin with her family in 1846 to live on a farm in Lake Mills.  Sadly, husband Thomas died there in 1848, and after settling his estate, Harriet returned to Sparta where she lived with her mother Hannah at 2 Liberty Street and then with her daughter Melodia Frederica Carmichael Foster in Brooklyn.

Harriet died in 1871 in Brooklyn and is buried in Sparta cemetery.

Ossining and the US Exploring Expedition of 1838 – 1842 (Post #1)

Ossining and the US Exploring Expedition of 1838 – 1842 (Post #1)
The Bark Europa

Soon I shall be heading to sea on the above Dutch-registered, steel-hulled barque as voyage crew to follow in the footsteps of Ossining’s own Alfred Agate, best known as one of two illustrators for the US Exploring Expedition of 1838 – 1842 (USXX).

Wait, what?

“To sea”?  

“Voyage crew”?

“Alfred Agate”??

“US Exploring Expedition of 1838 – 1842”???

Oh yes, I hear all your questions.  So consider this the first of several blog posts detailing the life of  Alfred Agate, the US XX (aka the Largest All-Sail Exploring Expedition You’ve Never Heard Of), and my 21st century pilgrimage on a tall ship.

Today’s post will focus on Alfred Agate, Ossining artist and International Man of Illustration.

Now, truth to tell, I knew nothing about Alfred or his family until I stumbled into the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet at the Ossining Historical Society and learned about this surprisingly influential family of artists.

First, perhaps you’re familiar with this house that still stands at the corner of Hudson and Liberty Streets in the Sparta area of Ossining?

2 Liberty Street, Ossining
c. 2023

Built over 200 years ago by Thomas Agate, it is the grand home of one of the first English settlers in Sparta.   

[NOTE: much of the following information comes from a 1968 article written by Ossining historian Greta Cornell, Ancestry.com, and Phillip Field Horne’s A Land of Peace.]

Here’s some background: Alfred’s father, Thomas Agate, was born in Sussex, England c. 1775.  He came to Sparta in the 1790s with his siblings John, William, Ann & Mary.  In about 1795, the Agates purchased two lots of Sparta land from James Drowley’s estate via a Richard Hillier.   They were Baptist/Republicans who didn’t believe in the monarchy, so settling in the recently independent colonies must have been a no-brainer for these motivated Brits.  

Thomas seems to have been scrappy and ambitious, and according to Philip Horne, kept a “House of Entertainment” in Sparta until about 1811.  (Excellent term, no? Sounds like a strip club to me, although it was likely just a tavern.)  

In 1795, he married Hannah Stiles and would continue living and prospering in Sparta.  After leaving the “entertainment” business, he would run a store in Sparta, manage the Sparta dock, and buy and sell numerous parcels of land in the neighborhood.   When copper was discovered practically right under his house in 1820, Thomas Agate was one of the first to invest in the Westchester Copper Mine Company. Unsurprisingly, nearby Agate Street is named after the family, and the house pictured below was still in the family as late as 1960!

6 Agate Avenue
In 1959, home of descendant Melodia Agate Foster Wood

Thomas and Hannah would have at least 4 children:

Edward Priestley Agate: 

b. August 29, 1798

m. Mary Williams (7 children “all died young”), 

d. November 22, 1872

Frederick Stiles Agate: 

b. January 29, 1803

Never married

d. May 1, 1844 (buried in Sparta Cemetery)

Harriet Ann Agate Carmichael 

b. March 29, 1817

m. Thomas J. Carmichael c. 1835

d. January 12, 1871 (buried in Sparta Cemetery, though his headstone is currently missing)

Alfred Thomas Agate 

b. Feb. 14, 1812

m. Elizabeth Hill Kennedy, 1844

d. Jan. 5, 1845 (buried Mt. Olivet Cemetery, Washington DC)

But Frederick, Harriet and of course Alfred are the ones we are most interested in here.

Older brother Frederick was a precocious and artistic child who, at the age of 15 or so, was sent to study art in New York City with John Rubens Smith.  Frederick would then teach his siblings Alfred and Harriet the rudiments of oil painting and find them teachers at the National Academy of Design (which Frederick would help found in 1825 with his bosom friend Thomas Seir Cummings, and painter/telegraph inventor Samuel F.B. Morse.)

At the time, historical and portrait painting was a lucrative career – photographs of course did not yet exist, so painted portraits were the only way to capture a person’s likeness.

Alfred studied with Thomas Seir Cummings at the National Academy of Design (NAD), and by the age of 20 he was exhibiting his paintings at their annual exhibition.  By 25, he had his own studio at 25 Walker Street and churned out portraits – both oil paintings as well as miniatures.

Now, during this time, it’s entirely likely (though I have so far found no concrete evidence of it) that Frederick and Alfred met and socialized with Charles Wilkes, the man who would become the leader of the USXX.  Wilkes was a Navy man, a talented artist himself, and, most importantly, a skilled navigator, cartographer and surveyor.  It does seem that he took some drawing classes at the NAD during the late 1820s/early 1830s.  

This connection will become important when the US XX, an expedition that was about a decade in the making, starts to come together in the late 1830s. 

In late 1836 our Alfred is offered a position as illustrator for what was then called the “South Seas Surveying and Exploring Expedition.” Here’s his acceptance letter written to Secretary of the Navy Mahlon Dickerson:

Isn’t his handwriting gorgeous???
Courtesy of the National Archives

Now, as promised, I will expound on the development and purpose of said Expedition in a future post.  For now, let us concentrate on young Alfred.

Alfred Agate, c. 1838
Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society

It is believed that brother Frederick painted this portrait just before Alfred left for his voyage to points south.  And if you look closely, you can see some subtle iconography in the form of the red sketchbook under Alfred’s left arm and the boat anchors on his fetching gold buttons. Here they are in close up for your amusement:

On August 18, 1838 six ships set off from Norfolk, Virginia on what is often described as the world’s last all-sail exploration expedition:

Approximately 440 men served – 82 officers, 345 sailors, 7 naturalists/scientists and 2 illustrators.

Alfred shared the load with fellow illustrator Joseph Drayton and their importance to the expedition cannot be underestimated.  With no ability to photograph anything, it was up to these two artists to document as many plants, animals, landscapes, and people as possible.  (Knowing that the US XX sent back about 40 TONS of artifacts, it would have been an Herculean task to document it all.) To that end, to save time, the illustrators often used the Camera Lucida, an optical projection device that some say was developed in the 1600s, though it wasn’t patented until the early 1800s.

Alfred tended to do landscapes and portraits, while Drayton focused on botanical and animal illustrations

Sometimes they worked from sketches of others – many of the officers were passable artists themselves and would give sketches to the illustrators to work from.

During the course of the expedition, hundreds of sketches, watercolors, oils, and later, engravings were made.  Just a small number of these were published in the multi-volumed post-expedition Narrative of the USXX.

Sadly, some of Agate’s work was lost in the wreck of the Peacock in 1841, and in a later fire at the Philadelphia publisher’s plant, but there still are a large number extant.

Today, the Naval History and Heritage Command website has digitized and interpreted its significant collection of Alfred’s USXX illustrations.  Check it out here.

The route of the USXX is mind-boggling:

And our Alfred sketched wonderful portraits throughout — here are just two of many:

Fijian Chief Ro Veidovi c. 1839
Ko-Towa-Towa, New Zealand (Maori) Chief c. 1839

Alfred returned to New York on June 10, 1842, landing at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. After spending a week in quarantine, he likely came back to Ossining to recuperate at his parents’ home on Liberty Street. He was apparently unusually sickly on the expedition (at least, according to Charles Wilkes’ memorial to him). He regained enough strength to relocate to Washington, DC to finalize illustrations for the first volume or two of the Narrative of the US Exploring Expedition written by Charles Wilkes. He also married Elizabeth Hill Kennedy in October 1844. But, tragically, his life was cut short by tuberculosis, that scourge of the 19th century, and he died just a few months after his wedding.

He was fondly remembered by all who knew him, and Senator James A. Pearce of Maryland would honor him with the following words:

The delicacy and sensibility of the man seemed to characterize the produc­tions of his pencil. His drawings, which have been published, and those which remain to be published, show a truthfulness and harmony which stamp him as an artist of the highest order of talent.

RIP Alfred Agate.

Type your email address below to subscribe and make sure you don’t miss the next exciting posts about the USXX and the upcoming voyage I’ll be taking to Tahiti, Tonga & Fiji in July/August 2024 to see the actual sights our Alfred memorialized!

Or click here for the next post in the series on the Bark Europa.

Ossining’s Connection to the Heisman Trophy

In procrastinating today, and you know I was taking it seriously because I got all the way into the sports section, I saw a story about Reggie Bush, former USC star player, who was just (April 2024) re-awarded his 2005 Heisman Trophy. (Long story short, in 2010, the NCAA decided that Bush had taken impermissible payments as a college athlete and he was forced to give up the award.)

Reggie Bush and his 2005 Heisman Trophy.
Photo courtesy Julie Jacobson/AP

But it made me think about Ossining’s connection to the Heisman Trophy.

I mean, did you know that the trophy was sculpted by Ossining artist Frank Eliscu?

No, this is absolutely true. Created in 1935 by the Downtown Athletic Club and named in honor of John Heisman, the club’s athletic director, the Heisman Trophy has been awarded every year to the Most Valuable College Player.

Now, I’m not exactly sure how 23-year-old Frank Eliscu landed this as his first commission, but he had graduated from the Pratt Institute a few years earlier, and apparently already had had a one-man show of his artwork, so perhaps that had something to do with it.

The story goes that Eliscu modeled the sculpture on his very buff high school friend, Ed Smith, who was a star NYU running back at the time. [Fun fact — Ed Smith had no idea he’d been so immortalized until 1982!]

Wikipedia tells me that Ed Smith demonstrates “the stiff-arm fend, a tactic employed by the ball-carrier in many forms of contact football” in his pose. But of course you all knew that.

But let’s unpack the Frank Eliscu story, because he is one of many important Ossingtonians who have flown under the radar (to use a cliche, sorry Mr. Gilligan!)

Frank Eliscu was born in 1912 in Washington Heights, NY and lived on West 178th Street with his parents, Charles and Florence Eliscu, who had immigrated from Romania, and two siblings. He attended George Washington High School, where he met the aforementioned Ed Smith, and went on to study at the Pratt Institute, graduating in 1931. After sculpting the Heisman Trophy, he apprenticed with sculptor Rudolph Evans, working with on various projects . Like the Thomas Jefferson statue for the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC. (!!)

At some point in the 1940s, he married his wife Mildred, and started studying for a teaching certificate at New York’s Teachers’ College. However, the war upended his plans and he left school in 1942 to serve in the US Army. They first had him working on camouflage and maps, but then transferred him to Valley Forge General Hospital where he worked for the plastic surgery department, modeling replacement features for wounded soldiers. He also invented some unique process to normalize the color of these plastic features and may have even patented it (more research to come!)

Discharged in 1945, Eliscu began teaching at what was then called the School of Industrial Art (today the High School of Art and Design) and taught there until 1970.

According to the 1950 US census, Eliscu lived at 195 Croton Dam Road with his wife Mildred and daughter Norma (OHS ’51) and is listed as a High School Teacher. In a 2001 Ossining High School memory book for the class of 1951, Norma is quoted as saying “though Dad became famous, in Ossining they were just Mr. and Mrs. Eliscu.  They knew everyone, spoke with everyone and loved small-town life.  I was not aware Dad was famous.  He was just Dad who taught school and did some sculptures in the evening in his studio.”[1]

Did some sculptures indeed!

According to his 1996 New York Times obituary, Eliscu designed “many larger bronze sculptures for banks and office buildings throughout New York in the 1960’s and 70’s. From 1962 to 1972 he designed the engravings for six glass works produced by Steuben.”

Courtesy of Invaluable.com

The New York Times obit continues: “He was the principal designer of the 1974 Inaugural medals for President Gerald R. Ford and Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller. President Ford later presented a bronze eagle, an enlarged three-dimensional version of the one on the Presidential medal, to Leonid I. Brezhnev, the Soviet leader.”

Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum

In 1983, his sculpture “Falling Books” was installed above the entrance of the Library of Congress:

Courtesy of the Library of Congress

In 1967, Eliscu was invited to become a member of the National Academy of Design (and here’s another Ossining connection — the National Academy of Design was founded in 1826 with the help of Sparta son Frederick Agate.)

So there you go — Frank Eliscu, Ossining sculptor and creator of the Heisman Trophy:

Frank Eliscu with the Heisman Trophy
Courtesy of alchetron.com

[1]  “Ossining Remembered: 50+ Years Later . . . in the 21st century” edited by Tom Schoonmaker, c. 2001

Upcoming Presentation on Alfred Agate and the US Exploring Expedition! Monday, 1/22/2024

Here’s a shameless plug for a presentation I’m doing in Tarrytown at the Shames JCC on Monday, January 22, 2024 @ 10am. 

Alfred Agate, believed to have been painted by his brother Frederick Agate c. 1838
Courtesy of the New York Historical Society

From the Shames JCC website:

Alfred Agate was the illustrator for one of the most ambitious and largest scientific exploratory expeditions that you‘ve never heard of the US South Seas Exploring Expedition from 1838 – 1842 – an epic voyage that sailed to South America, the South Pacific, Australia, New Zealand, Antarctica, the West Coast of North America, the Philippines, and Indonesia. He was born in Sparta, now part of Ossining, and was a very successful portrait and miniature painter before he went to sea. In this image-packed talk, Ossining Town Historian Caroline Curvan presents a fascinating piece of little-known local history.

The Shames JCC is located at 371 S. Broadway, Tarrytown, NY 10591.