We were thrilled for Lindsay Leard-Coolidge to join us for a fascinating look at how Bostonians in the 1890s embraced the legacies of Mary, Queen of Scots, and Charles I. These Scottish monarchs tried for treason, beheaded, and martyred centuries earlier and an ocean away resonated with the city’s elite thinkers. Among them were Isabella Stewart Gardner, who (unconvincingly) traced her lineage to the Stuart dynasty, and Ralph Adams Cram, who introduced the celebration of Charles I’s martyrdom and founded the Neo-Jacobite Order of the White Rose in North America. Through objects of material culture at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and archives at the Boston Athenaeum, this lecture revealed how these historical figures shaped Boston’s cultural, religious, and political ideas at the close of the 19th century.

About the Speaker

Lindsay Leard-Coolidge is an art historian specializing in late nineteenth-century printmaking and material culture. She earned her PhD in art history at Columbia University and her MSc in Scottish history at the University of Edinburgh. She held positions in the print departments of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, and lectureship posts at Harvard Extension School and Northeastern University. She is the author of Sublime Impressions: Prints and Printmakers of the Grand Canyon, A Sense of Place: Painters of Matunuck, Rhode Island, 1873–1941, and 100 Years of Cambridge History: Highlights from the Collection of the Cambridge Historical Society. She is currently writing a novel on Mary Queen of Scots.

This event was presented in partnership with The National Trust for Scotland Foundation USA