A Closer Look at Charley Longfellow’s “Japan Room"
Longfellow House - Washington's Headquarters NHS, 105 Brattle St, Cambridge, MA
Admission: Free
Charles Appleton Longfellow (1844–1893), the eldest son of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Frances Appleton Longfellow, was a globetrotter and avid collector. During his 20-month stay in Japan (1871–1873), he purchased and shipped home to Cambridge dozens of crates of artworks and decorative objects for himself, friends, and family. Upon his return in 1874, Charley transformed the sitting room at his family home into a “ Japan Room ” with the help of his cousin Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow (1854–1934). One of its most striking features was a ceiling decorated with more than 35 fan-shaped paintings arranged in a “scattered fan” pattern. Although Japanese art and decorative objects had entered U.S. markets by the mid-1870s, their availability and visibility varied considerably by city. Created in 1874, on the eve of the transformative 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, the Japan Room represents an unusually early American domestic interior devoted to Japanese art and design. This lecture examines its remarkable ceiling of fan paintings, exploring their origins and arrangement and considering how this distinctive feature of the room reflects the ways Japanese art was…