Join Penobscot Marine Museum for an evening of sea shanties with  Bennett Konesni and a screening of the film Around Cape Horn.

 

Around Cape Horn screening sponsored by 

Sea Shanties with Bennett Konesni sponsored by

Beer provided by

 

For more information, or to purchase tickets by phone, please call 207-548-2529.

In our latest installment of exploring the ports depicted in the backgrounds of our ship portraits, we explore Venice. Venice, located on northern end of the Adriatic Sea, was once at the crossroads of trade between the East and West of Eurasia. By the time this portrait was painted in the 1850s, the Venetian trade was in deep decline. Ships papers in the Museum's archives list the imports to Venice from American ports as petroleum. The Venetian glass trade remained popular during this time. 

HENRY BUCK of Searsport, Phineas Pendleton, Master. Leaving Venice, 1857. Watercolor by Giovanni Luzro circa 1857.

In the painting, you will see the following landmarks:

• St. Mark's Campanile towering on the left
• Sansoviao's Liberia Vecchia in the forefront of St. Mark's Campanile
• The Colonna di Marco and the Colonna di Teodoro to their right
• St. Mark's Basilica with its two domes
• The Doge's Palace just under the American Flag
• The ubiquitous gondolas

Detail from Navigational Chart belonging to  Captain Henry A. Starrett of Belfast

We are pleased to be part of the University of Maine System's "Putting History to Work" internship program this fall. University of Maine senior Sarah Oberink is a history major with a minor in Ecology and Environmental Sciences, who has worked with GIS mapping software. She is putting her interest in maps to good use here at PMM by cataloguing and rehousing our large collection of nautical charts. Sarah's efficiency and self-sufficiency has helped her catalog almost 100 charts in the one month she has been here.

One of the more recent additions to the PMM photo archives teamis Gilbert Welch. Like others here, he's a photographer himself, decidedly so. Gilbert grew up in Morristown, NJ, the son of a Maine native father and an Italian immigrant mother. Although he graduated from college with a degree in accounting, his notions of pursuing a staid, ordinary career quickly disappeared when he began to follow his artistic impulses.

He moved to Rockport, ME in 1979 to undertake a year of study at Maine Photographic Workshops (now Maine Media Workshops), in the days before the school received accreditation. The mean age of residents at MPW at the time was roughly 32. Gilbert remembers this as a peak experience, the time of his life. He was steeped in a culture of deep and singular passion for photography; along with everyone around him-students and instructors alike-he lived and breathed art. The diversity of ages and talent created a climate of mutual fostering; total neophytes mixed with seasoned pros, to the benefit of each. Critiques were often brutal. He recalls an experience one day of sharing a photograph in a class. He took the easy way out when asked why he made the picture, citing the beauty of the scene. The instructor read him the riot act, exhorting him to look more deeply at his creative motivations.

These lasting impressions are clear in the stories he tells. He never worked as an accountant. Everything he did after that was in service to his drive to make artistic photographs. He's worked as an assistant to commercial and corporate photographers, been an admissions clerk at MDI Hospital, worked in mom-and-pop grocery stores, and been part of a ground crew at Portland International Jetport-whatever left him time for art. His identity as a traditionalist is plain to see. He specializes in palladium printing, a costly and painstaking process which yields warm toned prints which lend a particular poignancy and elegance to their subjects. He strives to keep his eyes open. He says of photography: "In a way, we're all amateurs. Every day is a new experience."

We're lucky for his presence here. He's been volunteering in the photo archives since September of 2017 and has worked primarily at digitizing two of our glass plate collections. Our biggest thanks, Gilbert, for making a unique contribution to this cast of characters.

Eastern Illustrating  In Living Color!

If you have been reading our newsletters the past decade you know all about the Eastern Illustrating & Publishing Co. Collection, the little postcard company that could from Belfast, Maine. In 1909 , Eastern Illustrating began photographing Maine and the rest of New England,  making "real photo postcards"  until the

mid-1950's. The story doesn't end there however. Making black and white postcards in the 1950s was probably not the best business decision given that color photography had taken over the market. Enter David Hastings who began to work for Eastern and convinced them to switch to color postcards. Hastings went on to own Eastern Illustrating, making it profitable gain before he sold the business to the owners of Downeast Magazine. The Eastern Collection arrived at

Original building at the Penobscot Marine Museum, formerly Searsport Town Hall

PMM without any of the color images, which were thought lost until postcard dealers, John and Patty Vierra, donated a box of Eastern's color transparencies. These 425 images have now been cataloged and digitized and can be explored in our online database.

Way back in 2010 we started a campaign to raise $43,000 to purchase more than 7,500 Eastern Illustrating glass and film negatives from an antique postcard dealer who acquired them back in the 1980s. While the total was a large amount, the price per negative was reasonable compared to what they go for on Ebay or the open market. While most folks supported our goal of reassembling the Eastern Collection, their real passion was for the towns where they were from or where they summered or had connections. We came up with a campaign to tap into that passion in which people, businesses and organizations could make their donations that would secure the negatives from the places they cared about most. Fast forward 8 years and we succeeded in purchasing the collection and all the negatives of towns that have been adopted have been digitized and cataloged and can be enjoyed on our website. While the negatives are now reunited with the rest of the Eastern Collection their are still some towns that are still up for adoption. The towns of Brunswick, Freeport, Lovell, Ellsworth and Kennebunkport and more are still waiting to be adopted. There are even towns from other New England states. Please consider a tax deductible donation to get more of these negatives processed and made available. You can read about the campaign and see the lists of negatives to be adopted  here. It would make a great gift for someone that has everything! A huge thanks to all that adopted negatives already!

Give the gift of membership!

 

 

Give a glimpse into the past with one of our historic prints!

 

 

Adopting a town from our Eastern Illustrating and Publishing Co. photography collection in your loved one's name  could be the perfect fit! 

 

 

 

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