Overview

Francis Watts Lee and his family hold a special place in the history of American photography. F. Holland Day completed a series of remarkable photographs of Lee’s daughter Peggy, and the striking portrait of the child and her mother titled Blessed Art Thou among Women is one of Gertrude Käsebier’s most iconic compositions. In Artful Lives, Patricia J. Fanning uses these and other significant images as guideposts to explore the Lee family and the art and culture of their age. A social reform advocate, Francis Watts Lee was an artistic photographer and a talented printer, part of the circle of avant-garde artists and intellectuals who formed Boston’s bohemia. He married twice, first Agnes Rand, an award-winning poet and children’s book author, and later, after their divorce, Marion Lewis Chamberlain, a librarian and MIT-trained architect. Francis and Agnes’s eldest daughter, Peggy, who was so integral to the work of pioneer Pictorialists, died at age seven of juvenile diabetes. Her sister, Alice, who lost her hearing in infancy, became a wood carver and sculptor. Utilizing previously unknown family archives and institutional sources, Fanning traces the Lee family’s story in the context of major artistic, political, social, and religious trends, including the Arts and Crafts movement, Christian Socialism, and Aestheticism, while also showing how their experiences reflected the national culture’s evolving conceptions of family, gender, childhood, medicine, deaf education, and mourning. This richly drawn and gracefully written account of one family informs our understanding of this vibrant era, in Boston and well beyond.

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9781625342072

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Reviews

"This book achieves something truly special by demonstrating how creative work happens in the context of mutually supportive relationships. I wish more histories were written in ways that acknowledge this reality. In addition, it is rare to read an informative history that also touches the reader on an emotional level.""""—Rachel Snow, University of South Carolina Upstate """"This is an intricately researched, beautifully written, compelling, and innovative social history. Fanning makes the stories of an individual family of local and national significance in the 1890s and early 1900s more broadly relevant by paying such careful attention to the many ways in which the lives of each family member are representative of broader trends in American history.""""—Libby Bischof, coauthor of Maine in Photographs: A History, 1840–2015"

This book achieves something truly special by demonstrating how creative work happens in the context of mutually supportive relationships. I wish more histories were written in ways that acknowledge this reality. In addition, it is rare to read an informative history that also touches the reader on an emotional level. -Rachel Snow, University of South Carolina Upstate This is an intricately researched, beautifully written, compelling, and innovative social history. Fanning makes the stories of an individual family of local and national significance in the 1890s and early 1900s more broadly relevant by paying such careful attention to the many ways in which the lives of each family member are representative of broader trends in American history. -Libby Bischof, coauthor of Maine in Photographs: A History, 1840-2015

This book achieves something truly special by demonstrating how creative work happens in the context of mutually supportive relationships. I wish more histories were written in ways that acknowledge this reality. In addition, it is rare to read an informative history that also touches the reader on an emotional level. -Rachel Snow, University of South Carolina Upstate This is an intricately researched, beautifully written, compelling, and innovative social history. Fanning makes the stories of an individual family of local and national significance in the 1890s and early 1900s more broadly relevant by paying such careful attention to the many ways in which the lives of each family member are representative of broader trends in American history. -Libby Bischof, coauthor of Maine in Photographs: A History, 1840-2015

Author Information

Patricia J. Fanning is professor of sociology at Bridgewater State University, USA. She is author of Through an Uncommon Lens: The Life and Photography of F. Holland Day (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008) and Influenza and Inequality: One Town’s Tragic Response to the Great Epidemic of 1918 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010).

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