Gallery

Portrait of Maud Howe

The Art Association of Newport, now the Newport Art Museum, was founded in 1912 to benefit the cultural life of the community. In its early days, women were the driving force behind the establishment and operation of this now thriving institution. Carrying the torch in Newport was Maud Howe Elliott (1854-1948), whose belief that art was a civilizing influence informed her lifelong crusade to “cultivate and promote artistic endeavor and interest in the arts.”

Jane Stuart's portrait of George Washington

Jane Stuart became the primary caretaker of her mother and sisters after her father’s death, when she was only sixteen. One version of this painting hangs in the RI State House; another hangs in the White House. This painting was given as a gift from the Reverend Roderick Terry, Jr. in 1927.

Portrait of Doris Duke

Doris Duke founded the Newport Restoration Foundation in 1968 with the express purpose of saving colonial vernacular architecture of Aquidneck Island. She saved over eighty homes, including Samuel Whitehorne House, which she turned into a museum of Newport furniture. When she died in 1993, she left her Newport home, Rough Point, to NRF to open to the public as a historic house museum.

Ida Lewis’s rowboat Rescue

Ida Lewis (1842-1911) was keeper of Lime Rock Lighthouse in Newport and famous for her heroism saving people from the water. The rowboat Rescue was made by Thomas Stoddard and presented to Ida Lewis by the citizens of Newport in 1869.

Elizabeth Pelham Harrison

Elizabeth Pelham Harrison was the wife of famed architect and loyalist Peter Harrison. This portrait was completed by portraitist Joseph Blackburn, and was given to the Library by Mr. and Mrs. William M. Vareika in 1991.

Portrait of Miss Ellen Mason

Sisters Ida and Ellen Mason were Boston and Newport feminists active in the Art Association of Newport, as well as the Civic League and many philanthropic enterprises. Beginning in 1913, many women came to the aid of the Art Association of Newport consistently through the years. Ellen Mason along with Edith Wetmore provided press facilities for lithography, woodcuts and etchings.

The Ocean Waves Dashed Wildly High sheet music

The Ocean Waves Dashed Wildly High was a song “respectfully dedicated to the Heroine of New Port Lime Rock, Miss Ida Lewis”

Painting by Helena Sturtevant

Helena Sturtevant, Boston and Paris trained artist, was first and foremost an arts educator. The director of the school at the Art Association of Newport (after the men backed out), she diligently and painstakingly developed a first-rate art school. In a talk delivered to the Art Association on April 12, 1915, Sturtevant said that it was not a waste of time to learn to draw because it results in “the diffusion of art knowledge in the community. Teaching them to draw teaches them to see.”

Katherine Warren and Ottavio Prochet

Mrs. Katherine Urquhart Warren, founder of the Preservation Society of Newport County, was affiliated with many positions in the cultural heritage community. She was a collector of early 20th century American and European Art and shared these interests with her husband, George Henry Warren Jr., a lifelong Newport resident. Mrs. Ottavio Prochet was an Executive at Pratt & Whitney Company and Director of Tiffany's in New York City. She later moved to Newport living at "Stonybrook" estate and was an active socialite of local associations there.

Medal for heroism

This “life saving medal of the first class” was awarded to Ida Lewis on July 16, 1881 for saving two men from drowning in February of that year.

Rachel Moore Allston Flagg

Rachel Moore Allston Flagg married Captain William Allston, a widower, in 1775 and was the mother of the artist Washington Allston. After her first husband died in 1781, she married Henry Collins Flagg who became a member of the Redwood Library in 1791. This portrait was given as part of a group of eight colonial portraits by The Gladys Moore Vanderbilt Széchényi Memorial Collection in 1991.

Charlotte Warren Greenough

Charlotte Warren Greenough was a director of the Redwood Library. She devoted herself to finding and returning books that had been brought from England in 1747 for the library’s first collection. Her own interest was in French books and manuscripts, and she built one of the most extensive collections in the United States.