AFA Autumn 2021

Autumn 70 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com Save the Hancock Mansion Broadside, engraved by John Sartain (1808–1897), published by Thomas Oliver Hazard Perry, “Alphabet” Burnham (circa 1814–91), Boston, Massachusetts, dated June 6, 1863. Colored ink on paper. 45 × 31 inches. (R0006). The Hancock Mansion was threatened with demolition in the early 1860s. This large lithograph broadside was distributed in June 1863 throughout the city to protest the “act of modern vandalism, which demands the destruction of this precious relic.” This example is perhaps one of only two that survive; the other is in the collection of Historic New England, formerly the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, founded in 1910 by William Sumner Appleton. This brave effort to mobilize the public was unsuccessful, however, and the house was razed in 1863 in favor of, as the artist Edward Lamson Henry noted, “common modern houses.” These, in turn, gave way to a new wing of the State House in the early twentieth century. In death, however, the Hancock Mansion was transformed into a symbol of the colonial revival and the nascent historic preservation movement, and Henry’s photographs and painting of the house, today at Yale, were important parts of the Hancock Mansion’s legacy. In fact, it is not a stretch to say that the modern American preservation movement was born with the destruction of the Hancock Mansion. John Hancock and his wife, Dorothy Quincy, had two children, both of whom died young. Miniature portraits of both children, long misidentified, have recently been recognized and are in the collection of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence. Lydia Henchman Hancock, named for John’s aunt, died in 1777, when she was only nine months old. John George Washington “Johny” Hancock, was born in 1778. His tragic death, at age nine, on January 27, 1787, after an accident at a Milton pond, is memorialized in this penmanship exercise by a young student from the Pleasant Street School named Samuel Adams Dorr. Although Johny’s funeral was, in keeping with the custom at the time, a simple affair, two pieces of mourning jewelry created in memory of the young Hancock are in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A gold bracelet clasp contains strands of his hair, and a watercolor image that depicts a man and a woman, possibly meant to be John and Dorothy Hancock, flanking a memorial with the sentiment “GO SPOTLESS INNOCENCE TO ENDLESS BLISS.” The death hit John Hancock hard. He wrote in March to his friend Henry Knox that his “situation was totally deranged by the untimely death of my dear and promising boy.” An Elegy Upon the Death of Master John George Washington Hancock, Samuel Adams Dorr, Boston, Massachusetts, 1787. Pen and ink on laid paper. 18 × 21 inches. Gift of Samuel Swett, 1859 (R0005).