Summer Internship at the McGuigan Collection is the “Maine event”!

For University of Delaware Ph.D. students Megan Baker and Carolyn Hauk, the summer of 2024 will be remembered as a “Maine” event. Along the scenic coast of Harpswell, Maine, the art history scholars interned with the McGuigan Collection where they worked with a rich array of late-18th- and 19th-century art produced by American artists working abroad in Italy. It was a jam-packed summer of meetings with many generous academics and museum professionals visiting the collection, introductions to a variety of local spots on the peninsula and fruitful research punctuated by delicious espresso breaks.

Over the summer, Megan had the pleasure of working with many works on paper. Shortly after arrival, the McGuigans acquired a pastel portrait of the gem engraver Nathaniel Marchant by Hugh Douglas Hamilton, an Irish artist who spent much of his career in Rome. The timing was fortuitous, yet the pastel itself is even more incredible, as it has little pieces of cork nailed into the strainer to protect the pastel from its enclosing glass. Spending time with the portrait and investigating Hamilton’s technique helped her rethink questions about transportation and ephemerality that reverberate in her dissertation, which made this opportunity even more helpful.

Beyond the pastel, Megan researched several artist sketchbooks in the collection, identifying compositions and cataloguing the materials used for each image. Among the artists she worked on were Thomas Hiram Hotchkiss, a landscape painter who passed away before achieving his full potential, and William Stanley Haseltine, whose sketches reflect his intense preoccupation with geological forms. The process of physically flipping the pages of each volume and identifying how different artists used their sketchbook was a real treat, which has Megan excited to do more work on historical sketching processes in a future project.

Contextualizing the work of sculptors Horatio Greenough and Emma Phinney

Among the many strengths of the McGuigan Collection is its representation of work by American sculptors. Carolyn spent the summer studying the work of sculptors Horatio Greenough and Emma Phinney, who were among the cadre of artists who took to Italy for its rich sculptural history and Carrara marble. Working closely with Greenough’s sketchbook and preparatory that he completed during his trips to Rome and Florence, Carolyn researched the Italian objects, subjects and landmarks that he carefully studied and often returned to in his later sculptures. This process offered many insights into Greenough’s own artistic thinking: page after page, he captured and synthesized Italy’s ancient and Renaissance material landscapes, often intermixing them with portrait sketches of his own contemporaries (including those of other well-known expatriates). At times, it felt like gazing at a 19th-century predecessor of a Fellini neorealismo film.  

She also studied two remarkable twin busts in bronze and marble of a young Black subject done by the female sculptor Emma Phinney while she studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. Since not much survives in the archive regarding her career (outside of newspaper articles and census records) and the whereabouts of her many, many sculptures are largely unknown, it is incredible that both busts are currently displayed in the McGuigans’ galleries, flanking an 1879 landscape painting by George Inness. The detective work of contextualizing these busts was truly rewarding and opened opportunities to explore other artists in the collection whose work answered questions regarding the presence of Black laborers in Italian artistic studios.

It is no wonder why so many American artists worked among Maine’s landscapes. Looking between scenic views of the Harpswell coast and those of painted Italian landscapes, it was an amazing opportunity to follow in the footsteps of those artists as the McGuigan’s first art history interns from UD.