25 October–7 November 1875 • Hartford, Conn. (Hartford Courant, 17 Nov 75)
Dear SirⒶemendation:1explanatory note—The illuminations are fac similes upon vellum of two pages of a book of fifty illuminated pages which was made in London by a young lady.2explanatory note The fertility of inventionⒶemendation exhibited was something marvelous. The design, the spirit, the idea of each individual page of the fifty was distinctly different from all the rest, &Ⓐemendation yet there were no jarring contrasts. The book was a harmonious whole, & so equal was the merit & the beauty of the pages that no one was able to say with entire confidence that any one page of the book excelled another. I requested copies of two of the pages, & the reproduction was perfect, as much so as if the originals & the copies had been printed from plates instead of wrought with pencil & brush. It was said in London by competent critics that no illuminations of modern times approach this girl’s work. Being obscure & very poor she worked herself nearly blind upon starvation wages before her performances attracted attention. She could get noble prices now, but the luck has come too late; the genius is all there yet, but it cannot work in the twilight.3explanatory note
Mr. J. W. StancliffⒶemendation.
John Wells Stancliff (1813–92), was a marine painter with a studio in Hartford. In early life he had been a telegraph operator and baseball player and trained as a carriage painter and copperplate engraver before studying both oil and watercolor painting. In 1872 and 1873 he exhibited ten works on nautical themes through the Hartford Art Association and the Connecticut School of Design, and served as president of the latter in 1878 (Mattatuck; Groce and Wallace, 598; Yarnall et al., 5:3346).
The source of this letter is an item in the Hartford Courant for 17 November 1875, where it appeared with a brief introduction: “Mr. Stancliff having requested of Mr. Clemens a description of the marvelously beautiful illuminations loaned by him to the centennial exhibition, received the following touching reply” (“A Wonderful Work by a Poor Girl,” 2). On 25 October Stancliff began to receive art works and antiques loaned to the Women’s Centennial Association of Hartford for an exhibition that opened on 8 November. The purpose of the show was to raise funds for the construction and furnishing of a women’s pavilion at the International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures, and Products of the Soil and Mine in Philadelphia, which opened in May 1876 for six months. The women’s pavilion, a huge structure that cost about forty thousand dollars, featured the “products of female industry and ingenuity of every class” from a dozen countries ( Annual Cyclopaedia 1876 , 262, 272, 281; Hartford Courant: “The Centennial—The Coming Exhibition in This City,” 23 Oct 75, 2; “Centennial Loan Exhibition,” 2 Nov 75, 2; “The Loan Exhibition,” 8 Nov 75, 2, and 15 Nov 75, 2).
Stancliff evidently decided not to exhibit the illuminations of this unidentified artist, since the catalog made no mention of them. Three other works that Clemens loaned were shown, however: Beach Scene and Marine, watercolors by William Trost Richards (1833–1905); and Going to Church in Winter, an oil painting by Thomas Lochlan Smith (1835–84) (Yarnall et al., 1:5, 4:2950, 2952, 5:3290; Opitz, 771–72, 871; painting catalog nos. 23, 119, and 122 in Catalog of Works of Art of the Centennial Loan Exhibition [1875], information courtesy of the Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford).
“A Wonderful Work by a Poor Girl,” Hartford Courant, 17 Nov 75, 2.
L6 , 573–574; “A Wonderful Work by a Poor Girl,” Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean, 15 Dec 75, 5; Brownell 1940, 8.