“ALWAYS DELIGHTFULLY COOL”

Summer Vacations

In Northern New England

1825-1900

May 7 – August 22, 2008

“Always Delightfully Cool” examines the history of leisure travel and tourism in nineteenth-century New England through advertising prints, photographs, maps, sheet music covers, and large-scale chromolithographs. Northern New England, with its varied landscape of beaches, mountains, and lakes, boasted many of the nation’s most popular vacation sites, including Maine’s Moosehead Lake and Mount Desert Island, the seaside resorts of the North and South Shores of Massachusetts, New Hampshire’s White Mountains and Lake Winnipesaukee, and the northern Vermont towns of Burlington and Stowe.

Nineteenth-century advertisers, like their modern counterparts, created idealized images of the grand hotels, scenic landmarks, wilderness areas, and recreational pastimes. Exuberant language, bright colors, and exotic scenes enticed would-be vacationers to these new holiday destinations which, according to one advertisement, were “always delightfully cool.” The fifty-seven items in this exhibition are drawn primarily from the Boston Athenæum’s rich and diverse collection of works of art on paper.

“The Boston Athenæum’s Prints & Photographs Department, holds a particularly strong collection of nineteenth-century lithographs documenting New England culture and history. Many of these prints celebrate the region’s resorts, new transportation systems, and leisure activities. While most of the grand hotels, steamship lines, and amusement parks depicted in the exhibition are long gone or dramatically changed today, many of these areas remain as major vacation destinations,” says exhibition curator Catharina Slautterback, Associate Curator of Prints & Photographs at The Boston Athenæum.

An illustrated catalog of the exhibition by Catharina Slautterback will be available for purchase through the Boston Athenæum.