#smithsonian museum

Stevenson Memorial

Artist: Abbott Handerson Thayer (American, 1849-1921)

Date: 1903

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, United States

Description

Apart from the title, our only clue to the subject of this work is the inscription "VAEA," the name of the mountain in Samoa where Robert Louis Stevenson is buried. Stevenson's poetic tales of men at war with themselves had dazzled Abbott Handerson Thayer, whose own life was marked by exaltation and despair. And, like the Scotsman's most memorable characters, the Stevenson Memorial carries a hidden story.

Underneath this image is an earlier composition, a portrait of Thayer's three children that he had painted as a tribute to Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses. But Thayer painted over this with the figure of an angel to convey a more encompassing, personal grief. The artist's wife had died in 1891, and his many paintings of angels created thereafter suggest the mysteries of life, death, and the fate of the spirit.

Malcolm Ferguson at TNR:

President Trump is once again attacking Smithsonian director Lonnie Bunch and the museum system, the latest development in his “war on wokeness.” “The Smithsonian Institution, and the National Museum of American History in particular, under its current leadership and current interpretive ideology, cannot be trusted to tell America’s story honestly and in a way that is inspiring, unifying, and worthy of our great republic,” the White House Domestic Policy Council wrote in a report published the evening of July 4. “As this report shows, confirmed in the words of Museum leadership, this ideological capture has moved the Museum’s mission away from straightforward historical education and scholarship toward an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country,” the report continued. “By the intention and at the direction of current Museum and Smithsonian leadership, [the museum] has become subject to institutional capture by a radical, activist ideology that is fundamentally opposed to telling the noble, honest story of the great country we know and love.”

This is an un-American act of insanity by the Trump Regime with the intent to erase and censor fact-based history that doesn’t align with their twisted agenda.

See Also:

The Atlantic: A Huge Escalation in Trump’s Smithsonian Meddling

White House Domestic Policy Council [PDF]:

She rose from silence and seafoam, half ghost, half goddess.

Hey so I know there's a lot to focus on right now as Americans and it feels like it's neverending trash all the time but this is super important. Cleansing history is what dictators do. This is just one of the signs of Trump doing shitty things. Pay attention, take care of yourself and those around you if you can, and don't fall into the "well this is the new normal I guess" trap.