https://www.amazon.co.uk/Historical-Descriptive-Mariana-Griswold-Rensselaer/dp/5518826478/?tag=prabook0b-20
1885
(Here is the first important study of the leading 19th-cen...)
Here is the first important study of the leading 19th-century architect, a pioneer of Romanesque Revival. The work is filled with plans, photographs, drawings, and detailed discussions of all of Richardson's major buildings, including Trinity Church in Boston, Harvard Law School, and others. Written by the first female architectural critic, it is the foundation of all later research on Richardson.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Henry-Hobson-Richardson-Works-Architecture/dp/0486223205/?tag=prabook0b-20
1888
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Portraits-Robbia-Correggio-George-Winslow/dp/B000858D7E/?tag=prabook0b-20
1889
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Handbook-English-Cathedrals-Canterbury-Peterborough/dp/B011IRXJHE/?tag=prabook0b-20
1893
https://www.amazon.co.uk/content-Mary-Lustigs-Corinnas-Fiammetta/dp/B00087KZNC/?tag=prabook0b-20
1897
https://www.amazon.co.uk/History-City-York-Seventeenth-Century/dp/B01K15DEYW/?tag=prabook0b-20
1909
Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer was born on February 1, 1851, in New York City, New York. She was the daughter of George and Lydia (Alley) Griswold. Van Rensselaer came from a privileged background: her parents were independently wealthy and traveled extensively in Europe and the United States.
Mariana was tutored at home and studied in Dresden, Germany.
Van Rensselaer began her writing career in 1876 with the publication of a poem in Harper's Magazine and an article on art in American Architect and Building News. She published other articles and reviews of art exhibitions in New York City after that.
After her husband's death in 1884, Van Rensselaer moved to New York City to live with her mother. A devotee of pictorial realism, she published both Book of American Figure Painters and American Etchers in 1886. She also began writing her first important work in the field of architectural criticism, a series entitled "Recent American Architecture" in the Century Magazine. This led to the publication in 1888 of Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works, a study of the architect's work that is still a classic.
In 1892, she published English Cathedrals, based on a series she had done for Century Magazine, followed by an introduction to landscape gardening, Art Out of Doors, in 1893. She published studies of Renaissance and modern artists in Six Portraits in 1899.
Upon the sudden death of her son in 1894, Van Rensselaer became more interested in social issues. She taught literature at the University Settlement from 1894 to 1898 and was president of the women's auxiliary for two of those years. During this time, she wrote a collection of stories based in part on the slums of New York and their immigrant inhabitants, which she published as One Man Who Was Content.
She was also a public school inspector for two years and served as president of the Public Education Association of New York City from 1899 to 1906. During her tenure, Van Rensselaer pressed to have reproductions of great art hung in every classroom. She also wrote a pamphlet arguing against women's suffrage entitled Shall We Ask for the Suffrage.
Interested in Colonial America, Van Rensselaer published a well-received two-volume History of the City of New York in the Seventeenth Century (1909). Her other works include a book of romantic poetry and a volume of children's poetry.
Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer is best remembered as a penetrating historian of the arts, as the masterful biographer of the architect Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886), and especially for her History of the City of New York in the Seventeenth Century (1909), which brings the earliest settlers of New Netherland and New York as vividly to life as the best studies of the otherwise far more amply and sympathetically described early New Englanders and Virginians. The History of the City of New York in the Seventeenth Century, which ran more than a thousand pages and was published in two volumes, was planned to be only one part of a comprehensive history of the city, bringing its story through the eighteenth century up to the period of the Revolutionary War.
She also wrote criticism, reviews of art and architecture books, and poetry for children and adults, which won some measure of critical attention. Her series on gardening, written for Professor Charles Sprague Sargent of Harvard, served as part of the inspiration for Art Out-of-Doors (1893).
In 1923, Van Rensselaer received a gold medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
(Here is the first important study of the leading 19th-cen...)
1888Mariana's opposition to the vote was based on her conviction that women, especially lower-class women, might be exploited by politicians and that they ought to concentrate instead on their families and the education of their children.
In 1893 Van Rensselaer became an honorary member of the Society of Landscape Artists. In 1900 she was elected an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects.
Though hardly in the mainstream of American historical writing, Mariana does resemble the great literary historians of the nineteenth century in her cosmopolitanism, her wide general culture, and her desire to work on a large canvas, never stinting on details which bring her historical pictures vividly to life.
Quotes from others about the person
"Van Rensselaer always wrote for a general audience, and many of her books and articles depend heavily on the scholarship of others. But all her writings are shaped by her personal style and by her taste and intelligence." - John Early, in a profile in Notable American Women, 1607–1950
In 1873, Mariana married Schuyler Van Rensselaer. He died in 1884. The couple had a son, George.
February 1826 - 22 May 1908
6 July 1845 - 5 March 1884
11 February 1875 - 22 April 1894
Frank Gray Griswold (December 21, 1854 – March 30, 1937) was an American financier and writer who was a prominent member of New York society during the Gilded Age.
1857–1917
