Portrait of Tissot. American Art Association (1898).The life of Our Lord Jesus Christ: illustrated by over four hundred paintings and drawings taken from the four Gospels and from studies made in Palestine by J. James Tissot / exhibited under the management of the American art association of New York, managers for J. James Tissot, New York. New York: Press of J.J. Little & co., 1898.

Tissot’s artworks attracted much attention at the turn of the twentieth century. The traveling tour of Tissot’s watercolors drew masses of people, the record being 23,000 visitors in one day in Chicago. At the closure of the tour in 1900, the Board of Trustees of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences agreed to solicit funds for purchase of the collection, in part by public subscription. The call for help was made to Brooklynites through a series of notices and announcements in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

Subscriptions flowed in at the rate of $300 – $1000 per day for several months, and the names of contributing individuals were periodically published in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. These articles can be viewed online through Brooklyn Public Library’s digitization of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Conducting a simple keyword search for “Tissot” will return many results, revealing the public perception of Tissot’s artwork and the story of how the citizens of Brooklyn came together to acquire these works for the Brooklyn Museum collection.

Dismantling of the Schenck House. Records of the Department of Decorative Arts. Objects. Installation: Schenck House, [11] press and photographs (1933-1964).

Dutch culture has had its fair share of influence on us here at the Brooklyn Museum. One of the largest objects in our collection, the Schenck House features prominently in our connections to Dutch-American history. This month the Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives are reflecting on the ways Dutch history has influenced our collections, we are currently highlighting published and archival materials documenting the ongoing influence of the Dutch.

Sunday News clipping on Schenck House restoration, May 12, 1963. Records of the Department of Decorative Arts. Objects. Installation: Schenck House, [11] press and photographs (1933-1964).

In celebration of the ongoing influence of Dutch arts and culture, the Museum Libraries and Archives are highlighting a recent archival accession, a collection of documents regarding the Jan Martense Schenck House. These documents have recently been processed and are now available [pdf] to the public for research. Included in this collection are images of the Schenck House on its original location in Brooklyn; letters from numerous Schenck family descendents who have visited and supported the Schenck House over the years; and newspaper clippings from the 1964 Museum installation. We have also produced a list of published resources [pdf] on the Schenck House and Schenck family genealogy in the Museum Libraries. If you would like to schedule a visit to see any of these materials, please send us an e-mail. We are open to the public for research on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays.

Schenck descendant Edith Schenck DeLozier visiting the Schenck House in 1964. Records of the Department of Decorative Arts. Objects. Installation: Schenck House, [07] corresp: A-G (1961-1974).

If you are a Schenck descendant please let us know, as we always enjoy hearing from Schenck family members!

View of the Brooklyn Museum’s Eastern Parkway façade, showing the museum lit up for Hudson Fulton Centennial, 1909. B/w copy negative, 5 x 7in (12.7 x 17.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Museum building. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, S06_BEEi014.jpg)

The 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebration illuminated New York City in hundreds of thousands of electric lights. This idea can’t quite have the same impact as it did one hundred years ago. In 2009, events such as Earth Hour are celebrated to turn off electric lights and lessen our impact on global warming. However, to understand how the Illuminations were perceived in 1909, it may help to consider that electric lighting was slowly making its way into residential homes, and at that point in time only three out of every ten homes in New York City had electricity. This 1909 advertisement for home electricity highlights the benefits of bringing electric light into homes.

Advertisement for Edison Electric Illuminating Company of Brooklyn, at the time of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration. Printed in the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences Bulletin, Volume 3, no. 16, December 25, 1909.

The 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebration Illuminations throughout the city were unprecedented, “the result was an electrical display of great variety and wonderful beauty which excited the admiration of everyone and make a spectacle which had never been presented in New York before on so grand a scale.” The Brooklyn Museum participated in the celebrations by covering the building in 7,200 lights as seen in the first photograph of this post.

In addition to the Illuminations, the 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebration included art exhibitions, concerts, street and water parades, attracting visitors from all over the world and the Museum Libraries hold many published historical resources on the Hudson-Fulton Celebration.  2009 also marks the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival, and a huge range of Dutch themed events scheduled throughout the year can be found through the NY400 website.

Museum libraries and archives are rich storehouses of textual and visual information. This is very true of the Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives which function as the “story tellers” of the Museum by providing histories about objects in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum. Hidden within the Libraries and Archives are a myriad of stories concerning the Schenck houses, which were recently renovated and reinstalled on the fourth floor of the Museum.

Photograph by Reverend William Edward Schenck. From Account of my trips to Holmdel, N.J. & Flatlands, L.I. by William Edward Schenck.

One can find several fascinating books, photographs and other documents in the Libraries and Archives that tell about the Schenck family and the houses they lived in. Highlights include photographs from the Historic American Building Survey and an original journal by Jane Malbone Schenck who wrote about what her life was like in Brooklyn in the 1800’s. A selection of these documents are currently on view in the Library display cases on the second floor of the Museum.

These documents are of great interest to many, including architectural historians of Brooklyn who want to know what Brooklyn looked like when the Schenck houses were built more than 330 years ago. These documents tell us about the houses, the transfer of owners and families and the re-emerging of the architecture through refurbishments and significant structural transformations. The photographs tell us about the transformation of the surrounding landscape from sweeping meadows to a Brooklyn neighborhood. They also provide evidence of how the houses have looked as they have been installed at the Brooklyn Museum.

Jan Martense Schenck House reinstallation. Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Decorative Arts.
Exhibitions: Schenck House reinstallation, 1971.

2008 is the 185th anniversary of the founding of this institution as a library (the Brooklyn Apprentice’s Library) and we are planning a series of talks about the history of the Library and the rare and unique collections held in this repository. We will be focusing on the materials related to the Schenck family in this upcoming series. Please email us at library@brooklynmuseum.org if you would like to know more about the talk or Schenck related materials in the Libraries and Archives.

For a complete history on the Schenck Houses, see Kevin Stayton’s book, Dutch by design : tradition and change in two historic Brooklyn houses : the Schenck houses at The Brooklyn Museum, available in the Museum Libraries. Additional installation images of the Schenck house can be found in our online exhibition index.