 Cover: William Frye, one of nineteenth-century Alabama's most prolific artists, completed this portrait of Mrs. Hugh Watson Rutland (Sarah Louise Goodloe) in the 1860s. (Courtesy Mrs. R. E. Hereford)
|
Spring
1994, Issue 32
In the 1790s, mental
health patients were often confined to hospital basements or chained
by the waist or ankles to the walls of ten-foot square cells. But in
the 1930s, activists Thomas Kirkbride and Dorothea Dix fought for moral
medical treatment of the mentally ill, including an architectural environment
more conducive to recovery. And author Robert O. Mellown tells the story
of how, in 1852, Alabama became the first state to appropriate sufficient
funds for the construction of a mental hospital designed in the new
moral architecture, detailing the Alabama Insane Hospital (now Bryce
Hospital). Mellown outlines the workings of the hospital, along with
changes in the treatment of mental illness both in medical concepts
and philosophy of architectural design since the hospital's construction,
and how Bryce Hospital has dealt with these changes. In May 1881, thinking
he was on a pleasant trip to Tuscaloosa with his family, seventy-year-old
Reverend Joseph Camp was admitted to the Alabama Insane Hospital by
his wife and son-in-law. The shock of being admitted to the hospital
only grew during Camp's next five months and twenty days as a patient
there. Upon returning to his family in November, Camp published his
book, entitled An Insight into an Insane Asylum, at his own expense.
Camp's book notes the treatment he received as a mental patient of the
Alabama Insane Hospital, including practices of nurses and physicians
that often border on cruelty. To this day, Camp's book remains the only
significant exposé of the Alabama Insane Hospital ever written. In
nineteenth-century Alabama, few portrait painters were more successful
or more prolific than William Frye. Although his paintings captured
a record of the state's well-to-do families, Frye himself has remained
largely unrecognized during the past one hundred years. But with the
publication in the 1960s of new studies on portrait books from Southern
states, Frye and other artists have begun to receive attention from
art dealers, museums, and collectors. While pointing out Frye's signature
painting styles and techniques, author E. Bryding Adams follows the
life and artistic career of William Frye, from his beginnings in Alabama
to the prosperous 1850s and the hard times of the Civil War. The article
is accompanied by striking images of Frye's work, including both landscapes
and portraits for which he is best remembered. During
the Nineteenth-century, counterpanes were a familiar type of bed covering
in the South, a product of the cotton-producing economy of the period.
This article presents the different weaves and finishes traditionally
associated with handwoven counterpanes, and traces the evolution of
their development as handmade objects in the midst of advancing technology
to become treasured heirlooms in many Southern families. SOUTHERN
ARCHITECTURE AND PRESERVATION - "The Hopkins
Pratt House at River Bend" by Jeff Mansell
|
