Object of the Month

Longfellow House - Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site has a large museum collection consisting of thousands of objects, many of which are not regularly displayed in the house's furnished exhibit rooms. Every month, an object will be featured on this page, providing a look at an unusual piece from the collection.

 

On October 14, 1847, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow recorded in his journal “Went to town, after finishing a poem on Tegner's death, in the spirit of the old Norse poetry.” Longfellow was referring to his poem “Tegner’s Drapa”, drápa being an old Norse term for a heroic poem commemorating a deceased and often famous man. Esaias Tegnér was an influential Swedish writer, poet, and Lutheran bishop who died in 1846. A few years earlier Longfellow had translated part of Tegnér’s epic poem “Frithiof’s Saga” and received praise from the Swedish writer for the quality of the translation. Longfellow’s own later poem, originally titled “Tegner’s Death”, was included in his 1850 collection The Seaside and the Fireside.

This 1871 lithograph is a copy of a painting titled Tegner’s Drapa by artist James Hamilton. The scene was inspired by and titled after Longfellow’s poem of the same name. In it a ship, set ablaze, rides on a stormy sea with a red setting sun in the background, as winged figures rise to the heavens out of the smoke from the burning ship. The imagery springs from the following lines of Longfellow’s poem:

They launched the burning ship!
It floated far away
Over the misty sea,
Till like the sun it seemed,
Sinking beneath the waves.

James Hamilton, born in Ireland in 1819, came to Philadelphia as a teenager where he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He became well-known for his marine paintings which often featured dramatic scenes of storms and sea battles, and his work has been called both impressionistic and romantic.

Hamilton’s original painting Tegner’s Drapa was listed in 1869 as part of the catalogue of the Forty-sixth Annual Exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. It then belonged to Henry C. Gibson, a noted art collector and Board Member of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. A label on the back of this copy names the firm of Duval and Hunter as the printmaker, which advertised their 1871 chromolithograph of Tegner’s Drapa as being “Sold only by Subscription” at $50.00 a copy, of which only 500 were made. Their advertisement also described the original painting as “The most perfect work of art yet produced in America.”

When and how Henry W. Longfellow acquired this copy is unknown. In 1912 it was hung in a second-floor hallway and described in an inventory of the house’s art as “A Fire at Sea (Angels)”.

 

Click here to view past Objects of the Month.