The last grains of sand are slipping through the hourglass if you wish to see “200 Years of the Portsmouth Athenaeum: Collect, Preserve, Share” at Discover Portsmouth. This exhibit will close at 8 p.m. after Art-Round-Town on Friday, Sept. 1, 2017.
Thank you to co-curators Richard Candee, Robert Chase, Tom Hardiman, Carolyn Marvin and James Smith with help from Phineas Graphics on creating a comprehensive 200th anniversary tribute that includes rare books, photos, lithographs, paintings, and artifacts selected from the unique Portsmouth Athenaeum collection. This includes a gigantic poster for Frank Jones Ale, discovered under the porch ceiling of a local home. Also on display from a private collection is the painting of Mayor Christopher S. Toppan (1800-1861) by artist Joseph G. Cole in 1830. Toppan was a Proprietor and bequeathed $1,000 in 1861 for a book fund that still continues today.
Special thank you to Tom Clark of TCPictures.NET for creating the exhibit’s popular “then and now” video of Congress Street, a historic journey from the Discover Portsmouth to the Portsmouth Athenaeum using images from the Athenaeum Photographic Collection. Stay tuned later this year for Tom’s upcoming “Picture Portsmouth,” a documentary that features the evolution of Market Square as imagined from its earliest days to the present by using computer-generated models and images from the Athenaeum collection.
For more on the exhibit, click here: http://portsmouthhistory.org/athenaeum-explained-in-discover-portsmouth-display
Discover Portsmouth is at 10 Middle Street and is open daily from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, visit www.portsmouthhistory.org