The Smyrna Memorial Cemetery

Tucked Away On Atlanta Road, Smyrna Memorial Cemetery Holds City Trailblazers  An article by Haisten Willis  Thousands of drivers pass downtown Smyrna along Atlanta Road every single day, many of them completely unaware they’re passing one of the city’s most important historic landmarks: the Smyrna Memorial Cemetery. “I had a conversation with a couple the …

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Daniel Bowen: Boston’s Pioneer Museum Keeper

[This article originally appeared in the Boston Tab newspaper in May 1999] Contemporary Boston is a city of many great museums. The history of museum keeping in Boston had its modest beginnings in 1791, with the arrival from Philadelphia of one Daniel Bowen, age thirty-one, a close friend of the patriot-painter Charles Willson Peale of …

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Correspondence relating to the Italian Immigrant Experience

This interesting and profusely illustrated book traces the history of the four Sandonatese  families from which author James Gantilucci descends (the Gentillucis, Cuginis, Quintilianis, and Cedrones).

The Patriot Painters, Part 2: Gilbert Stuart, 1755-1828

Gilbert Stuart, Self Portrait In the case of Gilbert Stuart, the second of our painters, we are dealing with a more talented artist, one of the greatest portrait painters of all time, but a much less intellectually-engaged or public-spirited figure than Charles Willson Paine. Like Peale, Stuart grew up in relative poverty. His father, Gilbert …

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The Patriot Painters: Peale, Stuart, Trumbull and Early American Art, Part 1: Charles Willson Peale, 1741-1827

The three artists of the Revolutionary Era and Early National Period’s that I call The Patriot Painters--- Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, and John Trumbull, created works that became American icons.

An Expansion of Smyrna’s Photographic Resources

Marietta Daily Journal, March 6, 2017, Page 1 During the past year a committee of volunteers, working under the auspices of the Smyrna Arts & Cultural Council’s History Committee, met on a regular basis at the Smyrna Public Library to examine the back issues of the old Smyrna Herald and Smyrna Neighbor newspapers, published between …

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The Name Allston: An Appropriate Choice?

Boston’s Allston section is said to be the only community in the United States named for an artist---the great Romantic painter Washington Allston (1779-1843). This is of course is no small distinction. Allston “Self-Portrait, completed in 1805. By the 1820s this European trained painter was regarded as the greatest artist America had yet produced, having …

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John Singleton Copley’s Dilemma: Why America’s Leading Painter Fled Boston in 1774

Born in 1738, the son of recently-arrived Irish Protestant immigrants, John Singleton Copley was raised in cramped quarters over the family’s tobacco shop on Boston’ Long Wharf.