 Hi everyone! This is Dan O'Neill, the Executive Director of the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum. Before we get to our third Sunday presentation, I would like to thank the following businesses for sponsoring today's lecture. They made a vital investment in our museum, and their support is why we are able to bring you this lecture series at no charge. This month we are very excited to bring you Dr. Lindsay Hope-Varner, the Executive Director of the Roqueby Museum in Ferrisburg. Lindsay comes to Roqueby after four years at Cumberland County Historical Society in Pennsylvania where she led initiatives in preservation, heritage, and community engagement with history and the humanities. Lindsay's passion is for the untold stories in history and a clear understanding of the significance of diversity in today's community. Lindsay believes that museums are the places to ask what stories have been told so far and how those stories must include previously silenced voices. Thank you everybody for joining me to talk a little bit about Rachel Robinson-Elmer. My name is Lindsay Barner. I'm the Director at Roqueby Museum. And just to give you a little bit of background, if you haven't visited Roqueby before and you haven't been recently, we are located in Ferrisburg just on Route 7. We are a 90-acre site that includes a modern education center, historic homes, historic farm buildings, and two maintained trails, one of which is an interpretive trail that talks a little bit about how the farm developed back into a forest and a little bit of national landscape on the site. We are a national landmark site for the second generation Robinsons work as abolitionists in the anti-slavery movement as well as using the site as a stop on the underpass railroad. And our permanent exhibit Free and Safe, the Underground Railroad in Vermont, explores the family's abolitionist movement routes as well as the Underground Railroad within the whole of the state and the ties of the families to some major abolitionists across the United States. So we are open typically May through October, but we are open by appointment throughout the winter, so we encourage you to come out and have a look at the site. So before we get to Rachel, who I'm going to be talking about today, I want to go through the four generations who live in Roqueby. Roqueby has had a Robinson on its site since 1796. There have been four generations who lived on the site and the first were Thomas and Gemma Robinson who came from Rhode Island, settled in Vermont and purchased what we now call Roqueby from the Bacon family. Thomas Robinson was one of the first to bring in Marina Sheep to Vermont and became incredibly successful in cheap farming very early in the 19th century. By the 1815, they had made enough money that they put an Egyptian off of a farmhouse, so when you drive up to Roqueby Museum, you're greeted with the beautiful frontage with the historic helm and a portion of that front part of the house was the addition that the Robinsons had put on. The family were fakers and when you go through the house and we're hoping to resume inside of the house later on this year, you'll see that the house has beautiful high ceilings very much from the 19th century Victorian homes, but it's also very plain and very well done in terms of craftsmanship, but it very much has this reminiscent of Quakerism. Our logo comes from the sheep stamp, which I have a photo of here, this kind of double R for Robinson, so this isn't a brand, they didn't brand the sheep, but they would have dipped it in ink and then they would have dyed the wool so that when they were in the field, they would have known that this was Robinson, so our logo harkens back to this first generation and they are milino sheep that were brought in in the 19th century. Thomas and Jenna had several children, but the two that we explore in our permanent exhibit Free and Safe are Rowland and Rachel Robinson. Rowland and Rachel met at school, they married in 1820, and they became what we now consider radical abolitionists. They were close with many of the major abolitionists across the country including Lake garrison, who's the publisher editor, Liberator, Oliver Johnson, who was traveling all across the north helping to coordinate abolitionists working with garrison, and they spent a lot of their time fighting for the immediate abolition of slavery in the United States, and this is where our national landmark status comes from. Our collection contains numerous newspapers and books and periodicals that focus on the abolitionist movement and the anti-sovereignty movement. The Robinsons created a lending library to educate other demonstrators on the abolitionist movement. They helped to coordinate the Great Convention in Farrisburg, where Frederick Douglas came to speak during his visit to the Institute for, and their story is told throughout our site, and one of the amazing things about the exhibit Free and Safe is that we've been able to trace several freedom seekers that they worked with to rope the and are able to tell their stories. When you walk through the exhibit, you hear the story of enslavement and abolition through the eyes of Simon and Jesse, who are two freedom seekers. The Robinsons brought to rope the and stayed at rope the for a period of time before moving on. Rowland and Rachel had three children, and one of the most well known of those three children is Rowland Evan Robinson and his wife Anna, who lived at rope the. Rowland is well known for his literature. He became a very well known author both in Vermont, but also across the United States in the 19th century. He was writing about Vermont life. He wrote about, he wrote novels, he wrote about history, and in many ways we would consider Rowland an ethnographer today. He was a conservationist, naturalist. He was interested in history and culture and language, and all of these were incorporated into his books. He started out his life as an illustrator, and he did cartoons and commentaries for periodicals such as Forest and Stream, which I'm not feeling extreme today, lots of hunting and shooting magazines, and he eventually started to use his eyesight and the help of his life. He began to write, and many of his books were dictated with his life helping to write them for communicating back and forth with the publishers. But it's really his legacy that really created what becomes both museum. His children decide that they want to memorialize his contribution to Vermont literature and culture, and they begin to gather a lot of those drawings, writings, and it becomes the beginnings of what has brought the museum is eventually found around. Their children, this fourth generation, are really the ones who are cataloging this legacy and beginning to look towards the future of what becomes museum. The youngest daughter, Mary, who's at the top, was a talented in art. She took after her mother, Anna, was incredibly talented, particularly when it came to the naturalist drawings, and Mary very much took after her, and she started to make a career out of publishing botanical paintings, often for identification books. The eldest daughter is Rachel, who I'm going to talk about today, who became a commercial illustrator in New York City, and then the middle child was Rowland, who married Elizabeth Conaway Robinson, and they stayed at Rofi. They navigated this kind of shift in agriculture in Vermont, so she started to see a kind of population, a kind of agriculture. You see Rowley and Elizabeth really moving Rofi into this next stage, diversifying dairy, working more with the new orchard, and even opening the home to tourists as the tourism industry really starts to pick off in the 20th century. They navigate the war period, and eventually in 1961, after Elizabeth died, the museum is handed over to the museum in order to really preserve this legacy of the family. The one incredible thing about the Robinsons is you can call them pack rats, but they saved everything. From each generation, we can trace pieces within our collection, going the whole way back to Thomas and Gemma, and we're still working to piece together a lot of the items in our collection. We have an incredible partnership with Middlebury College, where our letters that belong to the family are permanent loan, which makes them easily accessible for researchers to go through. They're slowly digitized online, but we have 15,000 letters in this collection that tell the history of agriculture and abolition, slavery movement, and the story of each of family numbers, and the work that they were doing through all of the generations. The Robinsons I want to talk about today is Rachel Robinson-Ellman. So Rachel is the theme or her topic of our 2021 seasonal exhibit called A Modern Artist, the Commercial Art of Rachel Robinsons-Ellman. We decided to look at Rachel's art for a number of reasons. First, last year during 2020, we had an artist in residence, and I put that in quotes because Courtney never actually came down to Roque, she did for all of her work from Montreal, like so many things, pandemic kind of threw things up in the air. But Courtney had visited Roque before, and she absolutely fell in love with Rachel's art. We have boxes and boxes of Rachel's artwork in our collection, and during a visit to the museum, she had the opportunity to look through some of these pieces and absolutely fell in love with the work that she had done from her postpartum commercial arts to her paintings. She wanted to explore her life a little bit further. So through a series of blog posts that were offered virtually for free throughout the summer, she explored Rachel's correspondence course that she took as part of her early education. And we were able to piece together so many parts of Rachel's life and pieces of artwork that had never been on display before, that we really wanted to take it to the next step and create an exhibit that looked at just how beautiful and multifaceted Rachel's artwork is. So we thought this would be a really good opportunity to build off a very successful program from 2020 where people had to encounter Rachel virtually to where they could come and see her artwork in person. And then the second reason was is I had started in September, and I really wanted to get to know the Robinsons. And I thought, what better way to get to know our collection, to dig into a topic, and to really start to understand members of the Robertson family than to have an exhibit that I have to go in and research a family member and just spend all winter really getting to know Rachel and falling in love with her artwork and with her writing, with her letters, with her mother, with her sister. And this was a great opportunity for me to start to get to know the family, especially as somebody coming from outside of Vermont and knowing the history of the family, but not knowing them closely. As a historian, I really enjoy getting to know them very closely through their writings and by researching them. So this was a great opportunity for me as well. So Rachel was really introduced to art in a very young age. And I had mentioned earlier her parents, Rowland Evans Robinson and Ken Astine Robinson, and both of them were equally talented and artistic. Rowland started out as an artist. Anna was an artist, doing a lot of panicle works, many of which we have in our collection. And they introduced her and encouraged her to engage in art from a very young age. And one of my favorite pieces that we have in the collection is a series of picture books. And I have one here from 1880, which is little Rachel's picture book from Mother. And this book is just, it's so Robinson in many ways. It is recycled clothing. There's a brown outside cover that looks very similar to some of the clothing we have in the collection. It's cut up. It's linen pages that have been hand sewed together. So this reuse of items that the Robinsons were saving. And then pasted on to the linen pages are ink and ink drawing that were clipped from newspapers, magazines, and their pictures of bunnies, as you see here, of horses, of landscapes and people. And you start to see this kind of late 19th century illustration history in these little picture books that Rachel starts to copy through her education. And this drawing that we have on the left hand side of Annasima's Robinson is an early sketch that Rachel did of her mother that is very reminiscent of the illustrations that we published and were clipped into her little picture book. So we start to see the influence of her parents starting to creep into her education as well. And along with this, Rachel begins to show this talent. And her father creates a little sketchbook for her. She's showing talent as an artist. And so in 1891, her parents enrolled her in a correspondence art course with known art critic Ernest Knopf. And she begins to send drawings back and forth between Knopf. And he will essentially give her an assignment. She would do it. She would mail it to him. He would give feedback, and then mail it back to Rachel with the next assignment. And she does this for a number of years. From 1891 to 1995, she's corresponding with Knopf as taking this art course. And one of the really cool things that we were able to do last year as part of Courtney's Artist in Residence was start to pair up pieces in our collection with some of the letters that we have in the third college. And our education intern and Courtney were working closely together. And they found this incredible sketch that Rachel had done for the course with Knopf writing his corrections in it. And just looking at the sketch, the corrections make no sense whatsoever. There's a block with some lettering on it. And you can kind of guess that he's kind of playing with this like shades and depth. But when you pair it together with the letter from October 4th, 1892, you can really get an understanding of what Knopf was trying to teach with Rachel. And the really interesting thing is Courtney notes in her blog post that this style of teaching is very similar to ways that she would be taught, that are being taught today in art school, and ways of kind of showing how to bring out the best in an artist. So we have this incredible letter that we've been able to pair with this early sketches, Rachel's best learning for craft. And Knopf saw a lot of potential in Rachel's artwork. So much so that he invited her to New York City to the studio in order to train with him for a summer to help further her career. And he felt that she would get a lot more out of meeting with him in person for an intensive course than just communicating back and forth by a mail. So Rachel and her mother go to New York City for a summer. And she studies quite intensively with Knopf to really hone in some of her skills prior to going off to Goddard. So soon after, she finishes with Knopf in 1995. She goes off to Goddard College. And she continues to study art, she's teaching a little bit when she's at Goddard, teaching art courses. And she eventually starts to work commercially, but it makes her a number of years. Knopf is really encouraging her to send her illustrations into publishers. And she's a little part of it. But she does start to work with her father. And he at this point in the late 90s, Rowland is almost completely blind. He's lost his eyesight, that he's still writing, that he can't do illustrations on Knopf. So we find Rachel starting to do some illustrations for her father for his books. And one of them is Sam Lovell's Counts. And you can see we have her sketch in the collection for what becomes the cover of the book, as well as the sketch of her father that can be found in a lot of the, as the inside cover page. It's reused and re-published in a number of Rowland's books. And so Rachel's early career is very heavily influenced by her parents and their encouragement of her art. And so she goes on to daughter. And in 1899, she goes to the art students league in New York City. And this again is another incredible opportunity for us to piece together portions of our collection, as we think going through Rachel's life and trying to put this timeline of her artwork together. And I think that this collection, this piece that we have in the exhibit is just a really, just a great example of just how serendipitous everything has been from Courtney's work and piecing together letters of artwork to myself and my colleagues working in the collection to start to research Rachel. We've been able to piece together so many of these different artworks from this beautiful plaster cast to the drawing of that plaster cast as part of her education. And one of my favorite things that we found this winter, I was going through the collection, I found a folder of letters in the archive that were marked un-dated to Rowland Evans Robinson, RER. And the first letter in the folder was on art student league letterhead. And it was very clearly from Rachel to her father. And it's very likely, even though this un-dated letter that it was 1899, because Rowland died in 1900, and Rachel is back in Ferrisburg for most of his illness. So it's very likely an 1899 letter. And she's writing to her father about what she's seen in the war, convening all of these wonderful artists, working with very famous artists at the art students' league. And she notes that during her live drawing class, she, after they do their drawings, they hang them up on the walls and the teacher goes around and writes their thoughts on the drawings for them to take back before the next class. And she writes that on one of the live drawing sketches that she did, that Mr. Cox gave me the same criticism in the last time, to fats and rounds and ovaries, and know what to work for now, strength and simplicity. So I read this letter in the morning and I thought, wow, what a beautiful quote into kind of her educational experience. And later that afternoon, I was going through the art boxes, finding some pieces for this exhibit, and opening the very first box halfway through the items that were inside, I find this large sketch of a woman from the live drawing class, in the very corner of the sketch, it says soft, round and wobbly. And I immediately went back to that letter that I had written that morning, and was able to piece together this kind of criticism that Cox was giving her to a sketch that we have in our collection. So so many of these pieces have just started to come together as we've been doing this research. And we really started to get an idea of Rachel as she was drawing as an artist, going into the transition of the century. So one of the things that Rachel is most known for are her set of postcards, her first set of postcards in particular that she published with the Fallen Company. Our very first seasonal exhibit that we held at Rofi was the celebration of the 100 years anniversary of the publishing of these postcards. And they were beautiful illustrations of scenes of New York. And there's this fantastic quote from 1915 in New York Tribune that says, recently some interesting cards have been made by Rachel Robinson-Helmer. She has gone about the city and sketched some of the beautiful things that she's seen. And they're these absolute gorgeous postcards that show scenes of New York that are almost unlike anything that you would typically see as you were walking through New York, but instantly recognizable. Anything from the light tower to parks to city streets. It's they're just beautiful pieces of artwork that are highly collectible today. And Rachel became very well known for this postcard and the period that she did this is known as the Golden Age postcards. And she really gets called out throughout her career for this set of postcards. But she did these kind of in the middle of her commercial career. And 1915 she's already published a number of books. She's done illustrations for children's books, a number of advertisements. So there's a whole portion of her career that in many ways is kind of overshadowed by these beautiful postcards that she did as well. So what we really wanted to highlight in our season exhibit was all of the other commercial artwork that she was doing. That these postcards are a beautiful part of her work, but she also had a lot of other gorgeous illustrations. And one of the really neat things that we can trace in our collection is from the postcards to the illustrations is we can trace her entire process. And so we have here from 1903, in the youth companion, there was a little story called The Facility Little, and Rachel did the little illustration for the company, this story in the youth companion. And Rachel published a couple of illustrations in the youth companion quite regularly. But we have these beautiful sketches on 11 by 17 paper of Priscilla. And then we have the final print copy that was published at December 24th, 1903. And what's really neat about the collection of Rachel is we can trace every single part of her process, which is not something a lot of museums can say with her artwork. From her initial sketches, all the way to the playing around with the costume to the final print publication, we have all of this in the collection. So one of my absolute favorite pieces is from A Princess Finds a Community by Caroline Hoffman in 1918. And in Rachel's sketchbooks, we can see her thinking through this particular illustration book. We can see her playing around with the tunic and the pink and the hat, and the colors that the soldier is going to be wearing is holding a sword. Is he going to be holding a rifle with a bayonet? And she plays around with all of this in the sketchbooks. And then we can look at the final illustration and see what she decided to do in the end. And that's one of the most incredible things with Rachel's work is that she's not playing necessarily from historical accuracy, but she's looking at the beauty and the movement of the costumes and people. And she's really using these costumes and how she's denying them as a way to distinguish herself as a illustrator. And at the end of her life, Bea Barnum, who worked with Rachel and you, Rachel, notes that in more imaginative works, there was this gay, a lightness of touch and humor that made grown ups as well as children and the light and the very felt. And in particular, she's talking about the film's progress and her illustrations for the adaptation of that book. And one of the things that you see in illustrations within the 20th century is that many of the illustrations stylized are very similar. So you have this illustration from the film's progress, and it's very similar to other illustrations that you're going to see published in books all across the publishing industry in the country, early in the 20th century. But illustrators were able to remark on those illustrations through the costume. And one of the things that Rachel did was play around with those costumes so that it distinguished her from all of the other illustrators that are out there. And looking back on her life, a lot of her colleagues in the publishing industry noted just how imaginative she was. And you do get this sense of whimsy when you look at a lot of Rachel's work because she was taking a lot of time and thinking through those costumes as a way of distinguishing herself. And we see within Rachel's work that's not just distinguishing herself in terms of costuming for a lot of the children's books she was doing, but then also with some of the advertisements that she had, she had a style that you start to see over and over again. So from her advertisements for the General Federation Women's Club to an advertisement for MetLife Company, you see the reuse of some of these themes very much heartening back to her first postcard series. But as she starts to go through her career, and after the publishing of those first postcards, you see this kind of change from almost a picturesque type of illustration from the 1915 postcards to 1916, 1917, 1918. You really start to see her illustrations taken on her own style. And you have these gorgeous views of City of New York City, like in the General Federation Women's Clubs, where it's this kind of abstract sketch that's very distinguishable as the style line in New York City. And she starts to see within like the public top part where they're raising funds for replanting in France after World War I, where you have this kind of whimsy of the illustration that she did for children's books, neared with many of the advertisements that she was doing and the style of illustration that she's starting to develop for herself. And now we find that Rachel decides to do a second set of postcards. And the second set of postcards is completely her own. With the first set, she is working with a publishing company with the following publishers, those postcards. And she decides with her second set of postcards three years later that she is going to do these all on her own. So she prints them herself. She creates a building on blocks to publish them. She's cutting them herself. She is marketing them herself. So many ways we look at these postcards as essential. They are each one. There's very little outside input coming into those cards. They are her style. They are her vision. They are her view of York City. And we can trace each postcard from her initial sketch on the stiff board to the final publication. She even printed the posters herself and the wrappings of those cards herself. All of these were done by her. A lot of it done at Brooklyn. And what's amazing is you can see this complete shift from that first set of postcards, where some of them are very much like a painting to this kind of new, more 20th century almost art decade type of sketching through these postcards. Just absolutely gorgeous and bright and colorful and views of the city that you wouldn't typically think to see it. So one of the things that we asked in the exhibit and that we're constantly asking about Rachel, that when Courtney and I were kind of talking through this exhibit, what if Rachel had more as 1919? Very tragically, Rachel becomes one of hundreds of thousands of people to die during the movement in New York City or across the US, but she was in New York City at the time. And she was kind of building up to the height of her career. And her uncle doesn't issue with the remontor in 1919, but being on Rachel's life and asking for feedback from publishers and colleagues in the field. And many of them lament hearing of her death because they were excited to continue working with her because her illustrations were becoming known within the publishing world. And Dr. Griffiths, who was the author for Dutch fairy tales, which was one of the last publications that Rachel did, she did these gorgeous illustrations in the Dutch fairy tales that really start to hearken to this new illustrated style that she is starting to move into. And he was hoping to work with her for his next set of Belgian fairy tales. And upon hearing of her deaths and found my disappointment since it's your grief that she was passed away. And so we can't help but wonder where was her career gone? If you do a Google search or do a search of any kind, you don't see Rachel's name come up very frequently. If you search 20th century illustrators, in fact, you don't see a lot of women coming up. As we were doing research on Rachel and her illustrations, there's a lot of female illustrators in the 20th century. And Rachel's name doesn't come up even as a illustrator. Her postcards are well known, but her illustrations have largely been forgotten. And in some of the books that she published in, she's not even listed as an illustrator. We only know because her name shows up in some of the illustrations that she published. So we can't help but wonder what it is. And the exhibit really explores this question. And we ask people to kind of leave with their own answer. And we give examples throughout the exhibit of these just absolutely imaginatively beautiful pieces of artwork. Another thing that we explore and that we've been kind of talking through is what is the difference between commercial artwork and fine artwork? And in many ways, Rachel's postcards are fine pieces of art. They are considered beautiful collections of New York City. And Courtney, that was one of the things she wanted to continue to explore after her artist residency program was completed. And starting to look at this idea of commercial art also being fine art and where those lines start to blur. And that is one of the things that she's going to be talking about later on this summer. And looking at this kind of melding of lines between Rachel's education and fine arts and commercial artwork, and just how we can consider much of her publications and her illustrations very much part of this fine art tradition. So we invite you to come to visit this exhibit to look at Rachel's artwork and to really explore and come to your own conclusions of what if Rachel had the past 19, 19, and also just enjoy the beauty and beauty of these gorgeous illustrations by Rachel Robinson. So if you'd like to visit Ropey Museum for open seven days a week, May through October, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and in between we are open by appointments on November 3, March. And we hope to see you at the museum. Thank you so much. Thank you, Dr. Varner, for a wonderful presentation. Next month we are really excited to welcome Robert Grandchamp for his talk entitled Sketching Burgoyne's Campaign, The Story of the Von German Watercolors. The talk will focus on a series of paintings done by British and German soldiers in the 1777 Saratoga Campaign, specifically those done by a German captain. These watercolors can only be seen as copies in the United States. The reason you cannot see the originals is because they were destroyed by Allied bombings during the Second World War. We hope to see you next month. And as always, if you enjoyed this presentation and would like to support the Ethan Allen Homestead, please go to the donation link in the description box below or on our website, EthanAllenHomestead.org. Thank you very much and we'll see you next month.