7 page letter to Sylvester Rosa Koehler in 1889

Item Details

New York NY, Margaret P. Janes, 1889

fine

1889 letter, with enclosed list, from Margaret P. Janes in New York City to Sylvester Rosa Koehler in Washington DC, about trying to help her represent the “busts” or life masks by John Henri Isaac Browere on behalf of his heirs. [see transcript] Browere (1790-1834) works were described and photographed by Charles Henry Hart in a book published in 1899 [available on Project Gutenberg]. Some of the busts were exhibited at the Centennial Exposition in 1876. Browere’s heirs still owned the collection and made fourteen life masks available for exhibit at A Century of Progress exposition in Chicago in 1934. Margaret P. Janes was an author, in 1883 having produced The Artist’s Year: Original and Selected Poems of the Months, published by White and Stokes. Later editions included one in 1889 with illustrations by Arthur Quartley, J.W. Casilear and others. Among the extensive Koehler papers held by the Smithsonian is correspondence with Charles Henry Hart, and also a groups of letters from Janes about Browere, from 1881 to earlier in November. At first, she asks about Browere as she is writing about him, by 1889 she wishes to read what Koehler had himself accepted for the American Art Review. The project of trying to place Browere in the American art pantheon seems to be shared by James, Koehler, and Hart. Janes mentions the possibility of persuading Senator William M. Evarts of New York, or Secretary of State James G. Blaine, to be interested in the Browere collection. The price of $10,000 seems ironic given that Browere claimed that he had spent over $20,000 of his own funds in the preparation of the life masks at the various homes of the great men.