Charles Francis Adams Sr.
Charles Francis Adams Sr. was an American historical editor, writer and diplomat. He was a son of President John Quincy Adams and grandson of President John Adams, about whom he wrote a major biography. Adams served two terms in the Massachusetts State Senate before running unsuccessfully as vice-presidential candidate for the Free Soil Party in the election of 1848 on a ticket with former President Martin Van Buren. During the Civil War, Adams served as the United States Minister to the United Kingdom under Abraham Lincoln. Adams became an overseer of Harvard University and built Adams National Historical Park, a library in honor of his father located in Quincy, Massachusetts. Adams was born in Boston on August 18, 1807, he was one of a daughter born to John Quincy Adams and Louisa Catherine Johnson. His older brothers were George Washington Adams and John Adams II, his sister, was born in 1811 but died in 1812 while the family was in Russia. He attended Boston Latin School and Harvard College, where he graduated in 1825.
He studied law with Daniel Webster and practiced in Boston. He wrote numerous reviews of works about British history for the North American Review. Charles and his brothers and George, were all rivals for the same woman, their cousin Mary Catherine Hellen, who lived with the Adams family after the death of her parents. In 1828, his brother John married Mary Hellen in a ceremony at the White House, both Charles and George declined to attend. In 1840, Adams was elected to three one-year terms in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and he served in the Massachusetts Senate from 1843 to 1845. In 1846, he became editor of the Boston Whig newspaper. In 1848, he was the unsuccessful nominee of the Free Soil Party for Vice President of the United States, running on a ticket with former president Martin Van Buren as the presidential nominee. From the 1840s, Adams became one of the finest historical editors of his era, he developed his expertise in part because of the example of his father, who in 1829 had turned from politics to history and biography.
The senior Adams began a life of his father, John Adams, but wrote only a few chapters before resuming his political career in 1830 with his election to the U. S. House of Representatives; the younger Adams, fresh from his edition of the letters of his grandmother Abigail Adams, took up the project that his father had left uncompleted and between 1850 and 1856, turned out not just the two volumes of the biography but eight further volumes presenting editions of John Adams's Diary and Autobiography, his major political writings, a selection of letters and speeches. The edition, titled The Works of John Adams, Esq. Second President of the United States, was the only edition of John Adams's writings until the family donated the cache of Adams papers to the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1854 and authorized the creation of the Adams Papers project, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1857. As a Republican, Adams was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1858, where he chaired the Committee on Manufactures.
He was re-elected in 1860, but resigned to become U. S. minister to the Court of St James's, a post held by his father and grandfather, from 1861 to 1868. Powerful Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner had wanted the position and became alienated from Adams. Britain had recognized Confederate belligerency, but Adams was instrumental in maintaining British neutrality and preventing British diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Part of his duties included correspondence with British civilians including Karl Marx and the International Workingmen's Association. Adams and his son, Henry Adams, who acted as his private secretary were kept busy monitoring Confederate diplomatic intrigues and the construction of rebel commerce raiders by British shipyards. Back in Boston, Adams declined the presidency of Harvard University but became one of its overseers in 1869. In 1870 he built the first presidential library in the United States to honor his father John Quincy Adams.
The Stone Library includes over 14,000 books written in twelve languages. The library is located on the property of the "Old House" at Adams National Historical Park in Quincy, Massachusetts. Adams served as U. S. arbiter on the 1871–72 international commission to settle the "Alabama" claims that met in Geneva. He is considered one of the main contributors on this seminal work in forwarding the concept of world law through arbitration. During the 1876 electoral college controversy, Adams sided with Democrat Samuel J. Tilden over Republican Rutherford B. Hayes for the presidency. In 1876 he ran for Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. On September 3, 1829, he married Abigail Brown Brooks, whose father was shipping magnate Peter Chardon Brooks, she had two sisters, m
Claude Monet
Oscar-Claude Monet was a French painter, a founder of French Impressionist painting and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature as applied to plein air landscape painting. The term "Impressionism" is derived from the title of his painting Impression, soleil levant, exhibited in 1874 in the first of the independent exhibitions mounted by Monet and his associates as an alternative to the Salon de Paris. Monet's ambition of documenting the French countryside led him to adopt a method of painting the same scene many times in order to capture the changing of light and the passing of the seasons. From 1883, Monet lived in Giverny, where he purchased a house and property and began a vast landscaping project which included lily ponds that would become the subjects of his best-known works. In 1899, he began painting the water lilies, first in vertical views with a Japanese bridge as a central feature and in the series of large-scale paintings, to occupy him continuously for the next 20 years of his life.
Claude Monet was born on 14 November 1840 on the fifth floor of 45 rue Laffitte, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. He was the second son of Claude Adolphe Monet and Louise Justine Aubrée Monet, both of them second-generation Parisians. On 20 May 1841, he was baptized in the local parish church, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, as Oscar-Claude, but his parents called him Oscar. Despite being baptized Catholic, Monet became an atheist. In 1845, his family moved to Le Havre in Normandy, his father wanted him to go into the family's ship-chandling and grocery business, but Monet wanted to become an artist. His mother was a singer, supported Monet's desire for a career in art. On 1 April 1851, Monet entered Le Havre secondary school of the arts. Locals knew him well for his charcoal caricatures. Monet undertook his first drawing lessons from Jacques-François Ochard, a former student of Jacques-Louis David. On the beaches of Normandy around 1856 he met fellow artist Eugène Boudin, who became his mentor and taught him to use oil paints.
Boudin taught Monet "en plein air" techniques for painting. Both received the influence of Johan Barthold Jongkind. On 28 January 1857, his mother died. At the age of sixteen, he left school and went to live with his widowed, childless aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre; when Monet traveled to Paris to visit the Louvre, he witnessed painters copying from the old masters. Having brought his paints and other tools with him, he would instead go and sit by a window and paint what he saw. Monet was in Paris for several years and met other young painters, including Édouard Manet and others who would become friends and fellow Impressionists. After drawing a low ballot number in March 1861, Monet was drafted into the First Regiment of African Light Cavalry in Algeria for a seven-year period of military service, his prosperous father could have purchased Monet's exemption from conscription but declined to do so when his son refused to give up painting. While in Algeria Monet did only a few sketches of casbah scenes, a single landscape, several portraits of officers, all of which have been lost.
In a Le Temps interview of 1900 however he commented that the light and vivid colours of North Africa "contained the germ of my future researches". After about a year of garrison duty in Algiers, Monet contracted typhoid fever and went absent without leave. Following convalescence, Monet's aunt intervened to remove him from the army if he agreed to complete a course at an art school, it is possible that the Dutch painter Johan Barthold Jongkind, whom Monet knew, may have prompted his aunt on this matter. Disillusioned with the traditional art taught at art schools, in 1862 Monet became a student of Charles Gleyre in Paris, where he met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille and Alfred Sisley. Together they shared new approaches to art, painting the effects of light en plein air with broken colour and rapid brushstrokes, in what came to be known as Impressionism. In January 1865 Monet was working on a version of Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, aiming to present it for hanging at the Salon, which had rejected Manet's Le déjeuner sur l'herbe two years earlier.
Monet's painting was large and could not be completed in time. Monet submitted instead a painting of Camille or The Woman in the Green Dress, one of many works using his future wife, Camille Doncieux, as his model. Both this painting and a small landscape were hung; the following year Monet used Camille for his model in Women in the Garden, On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt in 1868. Camille became pregnant and gave birth to their first child, Jean, in 1867. Monet and Camille married on 28 June 1870, just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, after their excursion to London and Zaandam, they moved to Argenteuil, in December 1871. During this time Monet painted various works of modern life, he and Camille lived in poverty for most of this period. Following the successful exhibition of some maritime paintings, the winning of a silver medal at Le Havre, Monet's paintings were seized by creditors, from whom they were bought back by a shipping merchant, a patron of Boudin. From the late 1860s, Monet and other like-minded artists met with rejection from the conservative Académie des Beaux-Arts, which held its annual exhibition at the Salon de Paris.
During the latter part of 1873, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley organized the Société anonyme des
Winslow Homer
Winslow Homer was an American landscape painter and printmaker, best known for his marine subjects. He is considered one of the foremost painters in 19th-century America and a preeminent figure in American art. Self-taught, Homer began his career working as a commercial illustrator, he subsequently took up oil painting and produced major studio works characterized by the weight and density he exploited from the medium. He worked extensively in watercolor, creating a fluid and prolific oeuvre chronicling his working vacations. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1836, Homer was the second of three sons of Charles Savage Homer and Henrietta Benson Homer, both from long lines of New Englanders, his mother was Homer's first teacher. She and her son had a close relationship throughout their lives. Homer took on many of her traits, including her quiet, strong-willed, sociable nature. Homer had a happy childhood, growing up in then-rural Cambridge, Massachusetts, he was an average student. Homer's father was a volatile, restless businessman, always looking to "make a killing".
When Homer was thirteen, Charles gave up the hardware store business to seek a fortune in the California gold rush. When that failed, Charles left his family and went to Europe to raise capital for other get-rich-quick schemes that didn't materialize. After Homer's high school graduation, his father saw a newspaper advertisement and arranged for an apprenticeship. Homer's apprenticeship at the age of 19 to J. H. Bufford, a Boston commercial lithographer, was a formative but "treadmill experience", he worked repetitively on other commercial work for two years. By 1857, his freelance career was underway after he turned down an offer to join the staff of Harper's Weekly. "From the time I took my nose off that lithographic stone", Homer stated, "I have had no master, never shall have any."Homer's career as an illustrator lasted nearly twenty years. He contributed illustrations of Boston life and rural New England life to magazines such as Ballou's Pictorial and Harper's Weekly at a time when the market for illustrations was growing and fads and fashions were changing quickly.
His early works commercial wood engravings of urban and country social scenes, are characterized by clean outlines, simplified forms, dramatic contrast of light and dark, lively figure groupings—qualities that remained important throughout his career. His quick success was due to this strong understanding of graphic design and to the adaptability of his designs to wood engraving. Before moving to New York in 1859, Homer lived in Massachusetts with his family, his uncle's Belmont mansion, the 1853 Homer House, was the inspiration for a number of his early illustrations and paintings, including several of his 1860s croquet pictures. The Homer House, owned by the Belmont Woman's Club, is open for public tours. In 1859, he opened a studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York City, the artistic and publishing capital of the United States; until 1863, he attended classes at the National Academy of Design, studied with Frédéric Rondel, who taught him the basics of painting. In only about a year of self-training, Homer was producing excellent oil work.
His mother tried to raise family funds to send him to Europe for further study but instead Harper's sent Homer to the front lines of the American Civil War, where he sketched battle scenes and camp life, the quiet moments as well as the chaotic ones. His initial sketches were of the camp and army of the famous Union officer, Major General George B. McClellan, at the banks of the Potomac River in October 1861. Although the drawings did not get much attention at the time, they mark Homer's expanding skills from illustrator to painter. Like with his urban scenes, Homer illustrated women during wartime, showed the effects of the war on the home front; the war work was exhausting. Back at his studio, Homer re-focus his artistic vision, he set to work on a series of war-related paintings based on his sketches, among them Sharpshooter on Picket Duty, Sweet Home, Prisoners from the Front. He exhibited paintings of these subjects every year at the National Academy of Design from 1863 to 1866. Home, Sweet Home was shown at the National Academy to particular critical acclaim.
During this time, he continued to sell his illustrations to periodicals such as Our Young Folks and Frank Leslie's Chimney Corner. After the war, Homer turned his attention to scenes of childhood and young women, reflecting nostalgia for simpler times, both his own and the nation as a whole, his Crossing the Pasture in the collection of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art depicts two boys who idealize brotherhood with the hope of a united future after the war that pitted brother against brother. Homer was interested in postwar subject matter that conveyed the silent tension between two communities seeking to understand their future, his oil painting A Visit from the Old Mistress shows an encounter between a group of four freed slaves and their former mistress. The formal equivalence between the standing figures suggests the balance that the nation hoped to find in the difficult years of Reconstruction. Homer composed this painting from sketches. Near the beginning of his painting career, the 27-year-old Homer demonstrated a maturity
Thomas Couture
Thomas Couture was a French history painter and teacher. He taught such luminaries of the art world as Édouard Manet, Henri Fantin-Latour, John La Farge, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Karel Javůrek, J-N Sylvestre. Early life and education Couture was born at Senlis, France; when he was 11 his family moved to Paris, where he would study at the industrial arts school and at the École des Beaux-Arts. Art and teaching career He failed the prestigious Prix de Rome competition at the École six times, but he felt the problem was with the École, not himself. Couture did win the prize in 1837. In 1840 he began exhibiting historical and genre pictures at the Paris Salon, earning several medals for his works, in particular for his masterpiece, Romans During the Decadence. Shortly after this success, Couture opened an independent atelier meant to challenge the École des Beaux-Arts by turning out the best new history painters. Couture's innovative technique gained much attention, he received Government and Church commissions for murals during the late 1840s through the 1850s.
He never completed the first two commissions, the third met with mixed criticism. Upset by the unfavorable reception of his murals, in 1860 he left Paris, for a time returning to his hometown of Senlis, where he continued to teach young artists who came to him. In 1867 he thumbed his nose at the academic establishment by publishing a book on his own ideas and working methods called Méthode et entretiens d'atelier, it was translated to Conversations on Art Methods in 1879, the year he died. Asked by a publisher to write an autobiography, Couture responded: "Biography is the exaltation of personality—and personality is the scourge of our time." Death In 1879 he died at Villiers-le-Bel, Val-d'Oise, was interred in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris. O'Neill, J. ed.. "Index". Romanticism and The School of Nature: Nineteenth-century drawings and paintings from the Karen B. Cohen collection. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Media related to Thomas Couture at Wikimedia Commons Thomas Couture at Find a Grave Article on Thomas Couture
Exposition Universelle (1867)
The International Exposition of 1867, was the second world's fair to be held in Paris, from 1 April to 3 November 1867. Forty-two nations were represented at the fair. Following a decree of Emperor Napoleon III, the exposition was prepared as early as 1864, in the midst of the renovation of Paris, marking the culmination of the Second French Empire. Visitors included Tsar Alexander II of Russia, a brother of the emperor of Japan, King William and Otto von Bismarck of Prussia, Prince Metternich and Franz Josef of Austria, Ottoman Sultan Abdülaziz, the Khedive of Egypt Isma'il. In 1864, Napoleon III decreed that an international exposition should be held in Paris in 1867. A commission was appointed with Prince Jerome Napoleon as president, under whose direction the preliminary work began; the site chosen for the Exposition Universelle of 1867 was the Champ de Mars, the great military parade ground of Paris, which covered an area of 119 acres and to, added the island of Billancourt, of 52 acres.
The principal building was rectangular in shape with rounded ends, having a length of 1608 feet and a width of 1247 feet, in the center was a pavilion surmounted by a dome and surrounded by a garden, 545 feet long and 184 feet wide, with a gallery built around it. In addition to the main building, there were nearly 100 smaller buildings on the grounds. Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Ernest Renan, Theophile Gautier all wrote publications to promote the event. There were 50,226 exhibitors, of whom 15,055 were from France and her colonies, 6176 from Great Britain and Ireland, 703 from the United States and a small contingent from Canada; the funds for the construction and maintenance of the exposition consisted of grants of $1,165,020 from the French government, a like amount from the city of Paris, about $2,000,000 from public subscription, making a total of $5,883,400. In the "gallery of Labour History" Jacques Boucher de Perthes, exposes one of the first prehistoric tools whose authenticity has been recognized with the accuracy of these theories.
The exhibition included two prototypes of the much acclaimed and prize-winning hydrochronometer invented in 1867 by Gian Battista Embriaco, O. P. professor at the College of St. Thomas in Rome. Among the horological exhibits, stood out a monumental model, an elaborate conical pendulum clock crafted by two of France's most important artisans of the second half of the 19th century—renowned clockmaker E. Farcot and sculptor Albert-Ernest Carrier-Be Belleuse. Farcot exhibited several units, one of them it is in the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans, its base, which features the clock's face and inner mechanical movements, is carved from solid onyx marble. Atop the base, a bronze sculpture depicting a robed female figure holds a scepter. Rotating soundlessly from the female subject's hand, the scepter provides consistent motion that adds to the clock's sense of grandeur and mystery. From its base to the top of the bronze figure stands at nearly 10 feet tall. Farcot, the most well-known of the French conical clock-makers, established himself in 1860 and mastered his craft over a period of 30 years, helping to popularize the unique pendulum escapement, the mechanism which controls the motion of the inner wheels.
Carrier de Belleuse was one of the most important and renowned sculptors of the 19th century, as well as the teacher of Auguste Rodin. In 1857, his bronze sculptures grabbed the attention of Napoleon III, he was commissioned for several important national works, including his most famous piece, which still flanks the staircase of the Paris Opera House. One of the Egyptian exhibits was designed by Auguste Mariette, featured ancient Egyptian monuments; the Suez Canal Company had an exhibit within the Egyptian exhibits, which it used to sell bonds for funding. The German manufacturer Krupp displayed a 50-ton cannon made of steel. Americans displayed their latest telegraph technology and both Cyrus Field and Samuel Morse provided speeches; the exposition was formally opened on 1 April and closed on 31 October 1867, was visited by 9,238,967 persons, including exhibitors and employees. This exposition was the greatest up to its time of all international expositions, both with respect to its extent and to the scope of its plan.
For the first time Japan presented art pieces to the world in a national pavilion pieces from the Satsuma and Saga clans in Kyushu. Vincent van Gogh and other artists of the post-impressionism movement of the late 19th century were part of the European art craze inspired by the displays seen here, wrote of the Japanese woodcut prints "that one sees everywhere and figures." Not only was Van Gogh a collector of the new art brought to Europe from a newly opened Japan, but many other French artists from the late 19th century were influenced by the Japanese artistic world-view, to develop into Japonism. The Paris street near Champs de Mars, Rue de L'Exposition was named in hommage to this 1867 universal exhibition. Jules Verne visited the exhibition in 1867, his take on the newly publicized discovery of electricity inspiring him in his writing of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A famous revival of the ballet Le Corsaire was staged by the Ballet Master Joseph Mazilier in honor of the exhibition at the Théâtre Impérial de l´Opéra on 21 October 1867.
The World Rowing Championships were held on the Seine River in July and was won by the underdog Canadian team from Saint John
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, color or other medium to a solid surface. The medium is applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives and airbrushes, can be used; the final work is called a painting. Painting is an important form in the visual arts, bringing in elements such as drawing, composition, narration, or abstraction. Paintings can be naturalistic and representational, abstract, symbolistic, emotive, or political in nature. A portion of the history of painting in both Eastern and Western art is dominated by religious art. Examples of this kind of painting range from artwork depicting mythological figures on pottery, to Biblical scenes Sistine Chapel ceiling, to scenes from the life of Buddha or other images of Eastern religious origin. In art, the term painting describes the result of the action; the support for paintings includes such surfaces as walls, canvas, glass, pottery, leaf and concrete, the painting may incorporate multiple other materials including sand, paper, gold leaf, as well as objects.
Color, made up of hue and value, dispersed over a surface is the essence of painting, just as pitch and rhythm are the essence of music. Color is subjective, but has observable psychological effects, although these can differ from one culture to the next. Black is associated with mourning in the West; some painters, theoreticians and scientists, including Goethe and Newton, have written their own color theory. Moreover, the use of language is only an abstraction for a color equivalent; the word "red", for example, can cover a wide range of variations from the pure red of the visible spectrum of light. There is not a formalized register of different colors in the way that there is agreement on different notes in music, such as F or C♯. For a painter, color is not divided into basic and derived colors. Painters deal with pigments, so "blue" for a painter can be any of the blues: phthalocyanine blue, Prussian blue, Cobalt blue, so on. Psychological and symbolical meanings of color are not speaking, means of painting.
Colors only add to the potential, derived context of meanings, because of this, the perception of a painting is subjective. The analogy with music is quite clear—sound in music is analogous to "light" in painting, "shades" to dynamics, "coloration" is to painting as the specific timbre of musical instruments is to music; these elements do not form a melody of themselves. Modern artists have extended the practice of painting to include, as one example, which began with Cubism and is not painting in the strict sense; some modern painters incorporate different materials such as sand, straw or wood for their texture. Examples of this are the works of Anselm Kiefer. There is a growing community of artists who use computers to "paint" color onto a digital "canvas" using programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter, many others; these images can be printed onto traditional canvas. Jean Metzinger's mosaic-like Divisionist technique had its parallel in literature. I make a kind of chromatic versification and for syllables I use strokes which, variable in quantity, cannot differ in dimension without modifying the rhythm of a pictorial phraseology destined to translate the diverse emotions aroused by nature.
Rhythm, for artists such as Piet Mondrian, is important in painting as it is in music. If one defines rhythm as "a pause incorporated into a sequence" there can be rhythm in paintings; these pauses allow creative force to intervene and add new creations—form, coloration. The distribution of form, or any kind of information is of crucial importance in the given work of art, it directly affects the aesthetic value of that work; this is because the aesthetic value is functionality dependent, i.e. the freedom of perception is perceived as beauty. Free flow of energy, in art as well as in other forms of "techne", directly contributes to the aesthetic value. Music was important to the birth of abstract art, since music is abstract by nature—it does not try to represent the exterior world, but expresses in an immediate way the inner feelings of the soul. Wassily Kandinsky used musical terms to identify his works. Kandinsky theorized that "music is the ultimate teacher," and subsequently embarked upon the first seven of his ten Compositions.
Hearing tones and chords as he painted, Kandinsky theorized that, yellow is the color of middle C on a brassy trumpet. In 1871 the young Kandinsky learned to play the cello. Kandinsky's stage design for a performance of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" illustrates his "synaesthetic" concept of a universal correspondence of forms and musical sounds. Music d
Newport, Rhode Island
Newport is a seaside city on Aquidneck Island in Newport County, Rhode Island, located 33 miles southeast of Providence, Rhode Island, 20 miles south of Fall River, Massachusetts, 73 miles south of Boston, 180 miles northeast of New York City. It is known as a New England summer resort and is famous for its historic mansions and its rich sailing history, it was the location of the first U. S. Open tournaments in both tennis and golf, as well as every challenge to the America's Cup between 1930 and 1983, it is the home of Salve Regina University and Naval Station Newport, which houses the United States Naval War College, the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, an important Navy training center. It was a major 18th-century port city and contains a high number of buildings from the Colonial era; the city is the county seat of Newport County, which has no governmental functions other than court administrative and sheriff corrections boundaries. It was known for being the location of the "Summer White Houses" during the administrations of Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy.
The population was 24,027 as of 2013. Newport was founded in 1639 on Aquidneck Island, called Rhode Island at the time, its eight founders and first officers were Nicholas Easton, William Coddington, John Clarke, John Coggeshall, William Brenton, Jeremy Clark, Thomas Hazard, Henry Bull. Many of these people had been part of the settlement at Portsmouth, along with Anne Hutchinson and her followers, they separated within a year of that settlement and Coddington and others began the settlement of Newport on the southern side of the island. Newport grew to be the largest of the four original settlements which became the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, which included Providence Plantations and Shawomett. Many of the first colonists in Newport became Baptists, the second Baptist congregation in Rhode Island was formed in 1640 under the leadership of John Clarke. In 1658, a group of Jews were welcomed to settle in Newport; the Newport congregation is now referred to as Congregation Jeshuat Israel and is the second-oldest Jewish congregation in the United States.
It meets in the oldest synagogue in the United States. The Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations received its royal charter in 1663, Benedict Arnold was elected as its first governor at Newport; the Old Colony House served as a seat of Rhode Island's government upon its completion in 1741 at the head of Washington Square, until the current Rhode Island State House in Providence was completed in 1904 and Providence became the state's sole capital city. Newport became the most important port in colonial Rhode Island, a public school was established in 1640; the commercial activity which raised Newport to its fame as a rich port was begun by a second wave of Portuguese Jews who settled there around the middle of the 18th century. They had been practicing Judaism in secret for 300 years in Portugal, they were attracted to Rhode Island because of the freedom of worship there, they brought with them commercial experience and connections, a spirit of enterprise. Most prominent among those were Jacob Rodrigues Rivera, who arrived in 1745 and Aaron Lopez, who came in 1752.
Rivera introduced the manufacture of sperm oil which became one of Newport's leading industries and made the town rich. Newport developed 17 manufactories of oil and candles and enjoyed a practical monopoly of this trade until the American Revolution. Aaron Lopez is credited with making Newport an important center of trade, he encouraged 40 Portuguese Jewish families to settle there, Newport had 150 vessels engaged in trade within 14 years of his activity. He was involved in the slave trade and manufactured spermaceti candles, barrels, chocolate, clothes, shoes and bottles, he became the wealthiest man in Newport but was denied citizenship on religious grounds though British law protected the rights of Jews to become citizens. He appealed to the Rhode Island legislature for redress and was refused with this ruling: "Inasmuch as the said Aaron Lopez hath declared himself by religion a Jew, this Assembly doth not admit himself nor any other of that religion to the full freedom of this Colony. So that the said Aaron Lopez nor any other of said religion is not liable to be chosen into any office in this colony nor allowed to give vote as a free man in choosing others."
Lopez persisted by applying for citizenship in Massachusetts. From the mid-17th century, the religious tolerance in Newport attracted numbers of Quakers, known as the Society of Friends; the Great Friends Meeting House in Newport is the oldest existing structure of worship in Rhode Island. In 1727, James Franklin printed the Rhode-Island Almanack in Newport. In 1732, he published the Rhode Island Gazette. In 1758, his son James founded the weekly newspaper Mercury; the famous 18th century Goddard and Townsend furniture was made in Newport. Throughout the 18th century, Newport suffered from an imbalance of trade with the largest colonial ports; as a result, Newport merchants were forced to develop alternatives to conventional exports. In the 1720s, Colonial leaders arrested many pirates, acting under pressure from the British government. Many were buried on Goat Island. Newport was a major center of the slave trade in colonial and early America, active in the "triangle trade" in which slave-produced sugar and molasses from the Caribbean were carried to Rhode Island and distilled into rum, whi
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This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Hunt, William Morris". Encyclopædia Britannica. 13 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 938–939.
