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| Stillman in 1856 at age 29. His friend James Russell Lowell said of this sketch, which appeared in the first volume of Stillman’s autobiography, “You have nothing to do for the rest of your life but to try to look like it.” |
The William James Stillman Collection was given to Union College in 1959 and 1974 by Stillman’s son Michael. Michael’s son, another William James Stillman, was a 1942 graduate of Union, and it was at his urging that his father donated his grandfather’s papers and photographs to the college.
The collection is comprised of a wide range of materials reflecting Stillman’s long and prolific career in journalism, as well as his intimate ties to literary, artistic and political circles of the nineteenth century. In addition to close to six hundred letters and documents between Stillman and family, friends, colleagues and associates, there are several unpublished manuscripts by Stillman: essays, articles, stories and poetry.
Several large photograph albums contain Stillman’s photos of Greece, Italy, the Adirondacks, the countryside of Cambridge and the Charles River in Boston. A smaller album contains Julia Mitchell Cameron’s costume photos of Stillman’s second wife Marie Spartali. Other loose manuscripts are Stillman’s own manual on the science of photography, personal photographs of Stillman, his first wife and his country home in Surrey, reminiscences of Stillman in old age by his granddaughter, and a woodblock drawing of Stillman by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
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| Stillman’s photographs of the Athenian ruins are generally regarded by both critics and himself as his greatest photography. He first published a collection of twenty-six photographs as The Acropolis of Athens in 1870, a time when Stillman “gave photography his most serious professional attention as both an art form and a technical process.” He returned to Athens in 1882 to photograph them again. These four albumen photographs are from that second collection. |
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| Undated albumen photograph from unlabeled album. |
William James Stillman was born on June 1, 1828 in Schenectady, NY, the ninth child of Seventh-Day Baptists from Rhode Island. His father Joseph was a machinist, and his mother Eliza was a descendent of New England Calvinists, who hoped her son might become a minister. As a child, Stillman showed a disinclination for his father’s workshop and a love of drawing and the outdoors. The countryside around the family farm sparked his lifelong fascination with the artistic values of nature. Years later, he recalled that “it was a fortunate thing for my after-life that I lived so near the forests that all my odd time was spent in them and the surrounding fields.”
In 1845 Stillman entered Union College, then presided over by its illustrious fourth president Eliphalet Nott, who had held that position since 1804 and would continue to do so until his death in 1866. Stillman owed his education in part to his two older brothers, who had business ties to Nott.
Though he graduated in 1848, he always spoke with ambivalence about his Union education. On one hand, he had great respect for Union’s reputation as “the third university in the United States, coming, in the general estimation and the number of its graduates, immediately after Yale, Harvard being then, as always first.” And, he claimed, he was a “favorite” of President Nott’s, with whom Stillman personally studied during his last year.
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| Undated albumen photograph from unlabeled album. |
On the other hand, a college education, according to Stillman, “was supposed to be a facilitation for whatever occupation I might afterward decide on.” And he had it in his mind going in that he wanted to be an artist. He never truly forgave Union for not providing him with a technical art education, for honing his talents. The truth was that he was not a great artist; his theoretic knowledge surpassed his ability, a realization he came to himself many years later. Union, however, did prepare him for his prolific journalism, which was where his true talents lay.
After his graduation, Stillman moved to New York City, where he studied painting under Frederic Church during the winter of 1848-1849. Selling his first landscape in the fall of 1849, he then sailed to England in January 1850, where he met and worked with Joseph Turner, John Ruskin and the pre-Raphaelite painters. He soon returned to the United States, where he continued to paint. In 1855 he founded and edited the weekly Crayon: A Journal Devoted to the Graphic Arts and the Literature Related to Them, a journal for essays on poetry and art. Though financial difficulties and ill health quickly severed his connection with the journal, the Crayon brought Stillman to the attention of the great thinkers of Cambridge and Concord, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Louis Agassiz. He soon relocated to Cambridge, where, around 1856, he organized the Adirondacks Club, a summer excursion to the mountains for the Massachusetts literati. He immortalized the trip in his famous painting “The Philosopher’s Camp in the Adirondacks.”
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| An albumen photograph of the shed in the Adirondacks where Stillman brought the Adirondack Club for a few summer excursions, beginning in 1856. |
On November 19, 1860 Stillman married Laura Mack, with whom he would have three children. With the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, he sought more than once to enlist in the Union Army, but poor health kept him out. That same year, however, he was appointed United States Consul to Rome. Four years later he was Consul to war-torn Crete. His reports on the insurrection against the Ottomans, culminating in his book, The Cretan Insurrection of 1866-7-8, persuaded the “great powers” to send ships to rescue the noncombatants. Laura, however, could not withstand the stress of the continuous fighting and committed suicide in 1868.
Stillman moved to England in 1869, where he lived briefly with the poet and painter Dante Rossetti, and where in 1871 he married Marie Spartali, the daughter of the Greek Consul to London and herself an artist also. In 1875, he headed for the Balkans as a volunteer correspondent for the London Times, the paper with which he would be connected for much of the rest of his life. His reports from Herzegovina persuaded the British to recognize the Montenegrin insurgents. Stillman even gave the Slavic rebels a telescope, allowing them to gauge enemy locations and numbers. He was instrumental in enabling them to defeat 20,000 Turks.
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| Undated albumen photograph of W.J. Stillman in Crete. |
On commission from Scribner’s in 1879, Stillman sailed from Ithaca to the Aegean and Crete and later published his account of the voyage as a travelogue On the Track of Ulysses (1888). In 1889 he selected Rome as a correspondence base for the Times. There he worked closely with the Italian premier Francesco Crispi, helping him in negotiations with the British and tipping him off to a political conspiracy against him. For his help, Crispi publicly honored Stillman in 1891. Stillman returned the favor by writing Crispi’s biography, which would be published in 1899.
In 1898, after a career spanning forty years, Stillman retired to his country house in Surrey, England, where he wrote his autobiography and delighted in his grandchildren and the red squirrels on the property. He died there in 1901.
Adkins, Nelson F., “William J. Stillman,” Dictionary of American Biography 18 (New York: Scribner's sons, 1933), 29-30.
Begg, D.J. Ian, “William James Stillman,” American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
http://www.anb.org/articles/04/04-01240.html.
Bradbury, John M., “William J. Stillman and Union College,” Union Worthies 12 (Schenectady, N.Y.: Union College), 5-8.
Bullock, Richard Dort, “William James Stillman: The Early Years” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1976.
Ehrenkranz, Anne, “William James Stillman: Painter, Critic, Photographer,” in William J. Stillman, Poetic Localities (New York: Aperture Foundation, 1988), 9-27.
Lyons, Claire L., et al, Antiquity and Photography: Early Views of Ancient Mediterranean Sites (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005).
Miller, Frances, Catalogue of the William James Stillman Collection Introduction and notes by Barbara Rotundo (Schenectady: Friends of the Union College Library, 1974).
Richardson, Edgar P., “William J. Stillman: Artist and Art Journalist,” Union Worthies 12 (Schenectady, N.Y.: Union College), 9-15.
Stillman, William James, The Autobiography of a Journalist 2 vol. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co.), 1901.
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| Eliphalet Nott’s letter to William Henry Seward, August 29, 1861, recommending Seward as United States Consul to Rome. |
James Russell Lowell to Stillman, January 24, 1856. |
The Amateur’s Photographic Guide Book: Being a Complete Resume of the Most Useful Dry and Wet Collodion Processes (London: C.D. Smith, 1874).
American Consul in a Cretan War (Austin: Center for Neo-Hellenic Studies, 1966).
Articles and Despatches [sic] from Crete (Austin: Center for Neo-Hellenic Studies, 1976).
Autobiography of a Journalist 2 vol. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1901).
Billy and Hans: A True History (London: Bliss Sands & Co., 1897).
Francesco Crispi: Insurgent, Exile, Revolutionist and Statesman (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1899).
Herzegovina and the Late Uprising: The Causes of the Latter and the Remedies from the Notes and Letters of a Special Correspondent (London: Longmans, Green and Co. , 1877).
Little Bertha (London: Grant Richards, 1898).
The Old Rome and the New, and Other Studies (London: Grant Richards, 1897).
On the Track of Ulysses; Together with an Excursion in Quest of the So-Called Venus of Melos : Two Studies in Archaeology, Made During a Cruise Among the Greek Islands (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1888).
Poetic Localities of Cambridge (Boston: J.R. Osgood and Company, 1876).
Poetic Localities: Photographs of Adirondacks, Cambridge, Crete, Italy, Athens (New York: Aperture Foundation, in association with the International Center of Photography, 1988). This book, a reprint of the one listed above, contains extensive annotations about the photos and a collection of critical essays about Stillman’s life and career.
The Union of Italy, 1815-1895 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909).
Venus and Apollo in Painting and Sculpture (London: Bliss, Sands & Co., 1897).
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| Marie Spartali, Stillman’s second wife, whom he married in 1871, in an albumen photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron. The daughter of the Greek consul-general to London, Marie was herself a pre-Raphaelite artist and one of Cameron’s favorite subjects. |
In 1855 Stillman began publication of The Crayon, a weekly journal featuring art essays and poetry. Though short-lived, the journal brought him to the attention of the Concord literary elite, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. |
Rudyard Kipling to Stillman, August 4, 1874. |
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