Winter 2016

Winter 154 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com benefactors cared for the structure, reclaimed many of the original holdings, and added prints, paintings, sculpture and furniture. Pride of place is given to Gilbert Stuart’s Self Portrait (1778) (Fig. 6), and the likenesses of Newport’s powerful merchants and political f igures by the leading colonial painters John Smibert (Fig. 7) and Robert Feke. Collections also include a circa-1760 card table (Fig. 8) attributed to John Townsend, and a silver tankard (Fig. 9) by Samuel Vernon, attesting to the high quality of decorative art in eighteenth-century Newport (Fig. 10). By the mid-nineteenth century, the library had acquired the status of a monument from a heroic past. The poets Julia Ward Howe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Emma Lazarus, and writers Edith Wharton and Henry James, who variously visited and spent summers in Newport, joined the library as members, and praised the building as a time honored treasure. As a focal point of Newport’s literati in an age of high romanticism, the Redwood Library achieved the distinction of a revered cultural icon. When expansion became a necessity, the library’s governing committees selected architects George Snell, in 1858, and George Champlin Mason, in 1875, to add reading and delivery rooms to the eastern end of the structure. 6 The purity of Harrison’s original temple front on the west, facing Bellevue Avenue, was to be preserved now that it held the position of a memorial to the colonial era in one of America’s most historically intact cities (Fig. 11). Beyond the legendary portico, fine collections, and association with famous names, the significance of the Redwood Library resides in its role as an example of the relationship between buildings and books since the structure itself arises from the pages of renowned architectural treatises. In keeping with this dialogue between design and literature, the library holds the Cary Collection of English and Continental pattern books, including the titles Peter Harrison consulted for his own projects. There are volumes on architecture and the decorative arts from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries by such masters as Jean Tijou, Juste- Aurele Meissonier, Thomas Chippendale, Robert and James Adams and Thomas Sheraton. 7 In November 2015, the Cary Collection was enhanced with the acquisition of fifty-two notable publications, such as Vincenzo Scamozzi’s The Mirror of Architecture (1676). These combined treatises, books, and folios now provide a comprehensive research resource for scholars of design history in a setting infused with the air of antiquity. Today, the Redwood Library and Athenaeum is a National Historic Landmark and has a U. S. postage stamp in its honor. A time capsule of past glories and a fully functioning modern library open to all, it remains a place of both quiet study and lively