Gems of Art for Home and Fireside.
Her first book
(Charlotte Perkins Gilman) Stetson, Mrs. Charles Walter. Gems of Art for the Home and Fireside. Providence, Rhode Island: J.A. and & R.A. Reid, Publishers, (1888).
4to.; pencil marks on page 86; upper and lower gutters repaired; tan cloth; decoratively printed in red, green and brown; lightly soiled. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of Gilman’s first book, a large art book that prints fifty black and white reproductions of paintings on the right-hand pages, and Gilman’s pedagogical explanations on the left-hand pages, though some – at least one – spans two pages and some left-hand page shave decorations; OCLC locates 10 copies, but this is exceedingly rare in commerce, a handful of booksellers queried were not even aware of its existence – likely because she only published it under her married name – and it has received very little critical attention.
In her Preface, Gilman links art appreciation to an interest in humanity and a sense of nationalism: “One of the most hopeful signs of our time is the growing instinct in art in all its forms. The art instinct, so universally existent in humanity, is one of the most potent factos in civilization.” She continues,
Art in America is free, but has to struggle with the indifference of a young and growing people, who have so much to do so far to create and maintain their nationality, and develop their mighty country, that they have ignored the power of beauty very largely. But that time is past; American has found that art is useful in the highest sense, and has a good paying quality. Art in public is good, great buildings, fine statues, galleries of paintings, but art in the home is the most strong and lasting influence. It lifts and brightens life to the worn mother and the hard-working father; it adds constant charm to social intercourse, and, most important of all, it helps to give our children health and pleasure – a broad intelligent appreciation of beauty everywhere.
The reproductions Gilman included here range from a multitude of genres: religion, nature, mythology, portraits, home scenes of the upper and lower classes, architectural representations, landscapes, still lifes, and Orientalism. The most well-known artist included here is Leonardo da Vinci, for The Last Supper, but the majority of the artists featured herein are lesser-known Europeans, like Albert Edelfelt, Davidson Knowles, and Michael Peter Ancher.
Gilman’s accompanying commentary gives background on the artists, the historical subjects they are representing, and provides interpretation of the pictured scene. Remarkably, much of what she writes reveals her sympathy for humanity, and is often political or moral in tone. In a painting by Albert Edelfelt, titled, A Parisian Lady – Time of the Directory, Gilman writes,
This smiling Parisienne, in wide, flaring, umbrella-like bonnet, exhibited her charm of countenance and costume in France in the time of the Directory. After the execution – the murder of Louis XVI – came the republic, the internecine strife between the Girondists and the Jacobins, Charlotte Corday, the Reign of Terror, Napoleon, and the Directory…In those deadly years of the Terror, when the guillotine counted new victims every day, and the prisons were thronged with aristocrats of every age; those helpless prisoners, victims, whose only outlook was the tumbrel and the knife, who knew not what day was to be their last, were not only brave, but gay. They joked, and chatted, and played merry games in the very jaws of death. No nation but France could have produced such character. (8)
In her paragraph accompanying A Slave Trade, she explains slavery in the Middle East: “Sad and terrible as slavery is in any form, it is less so among the Eastern nations than elsewhere. Their despotic government makes every man a slave in one sense, and their religion enjoins kindness and even certain justice in this relation. The women are slaves. Each man is allowed four wives, with ample privileges of divorce and remarriage, and as many slaves as he can support” (14).
About Davidson Knowles’s The Old Guard, a portrait of a man in armor from the Stuart period, during a period of intense devotion to Calvinism, she writes, “The down-trodden and helpless classes of society are ever watching with angry eyes the fashion, folly and sin of the wealthy and great, and a religion, which exalts the poor and specially reviles the rich man’s faults, always strikes deep and spreads far” (20).
Gilman (1860-1935) was a feminist author and critic. She was born Charlotte Perkins in Hartford, CT., the great-niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher. Her father abandoned the family when she was a child, and they were left destitute. Gilman attended school until she was about fifteen, later enrolling in classes at the Rhode Island School of Design. In her early twenties, she worked as a commercial artist with her cousin Robert Brown, and also taught art and tutored children.
She married Charles Walter Stetson in 1884, and gave birth to a daughter she named Katherine Beecher – likely in honor of her illustrious forbears. She suffered from severe depression after the birth of her daughter and her doctor advised a rest cure. She separated from her husband in 1888, and divorced him in 1894; it is unclear if this book was published before or after their separation. Gilman moved to California to pursue a new life, and it is at this time that she became interested in women’s rights and feminism; indeed, part of her literary and activist legacy is her focus on gender as a category of social analysis, which would prove prescient for the women’s movement in the 1960s.
She published several books during this time, and earned a living as a lecturer and a social activist. Her writings include fiction, non-fiction and verse: In This Our World (1893), Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between men and Women as a Factor in Social Relations (1898), The Yellow Wallpaper (1899), Concerning Children (1903), The Home: Its Work and Influence (1904), What Diantha Did (1910), The Crux (1911), Suffrage Songs and Verses (1911), Moving the Mountain (1911), Human Work (1911), Herland: A Feminist Utopian Novel (1915), and His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of our Mothers (1923).
In 1900, she married her first cousin, George Houghton Gilman; he died unexpectedly in 1934. By this time, Gilman had been diagnosed with inoperable breast cancer, and she committed suicide in 1935, when she was seventy-five years old.
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