This painting has intrigued me ever since it was donated to the Smith College Museum of Art. The central image is of a major disaster befalling a nineteenth century port city, possibly a whale oil fire that threatens to consume numerous ships and warehouses. But the rest of the image seems to show a regular day at the harbor with boats and ferries making their way across the water, a hot air balloon in the sky and a group of well-dressed citizens who look like the stepped out of Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte. We only know the artist’s initials, H. B. L. We have tried in vain to pin down a location and date for the painting. We have found descriptions of fires in New Bedford, Mass and Portland Maine, but there are elements of the painting that don’t match those locales or the fires they suffered. Is this a scene of a real fire? Did the artist just imagine it? Is it some sort of composite that we’ll never untangle?  Finally, in the foreground you can barely make out where HBL initially painted the quay where the spectators are standing in a different shape that went further out into the harbor. He or she then painted it out, but now as the covering paint grows more transparent with age the original quay is re-establishing a ghostly presence.

This Gospel Book is the most prominent artifact in the Museum’s collection.  The scribe Garabed completed this extraordinary piece in 1207 A.D, after 11 years of work, at the monastery of Surp Garabed near the town of Jurak, and became blind as a result of the endeavor. The book was given to priest Vartan, the donor's ancestor, who returned with the book to his hometown, later named Tomarza, where it remained for over 700 years passed down within one family lineage of priests (the Der Garabedian/Hazarshahian/Chorbajian family.)

As the possessor of the Holy Book, the Der Garabedian family was respected by both Armenians and Turks, and it was believed that no harm could fall upon the family. If one became sick, one would ask the family for "the blessing of the book" to cure their disease. A supplicant would rub a piece of bread or a rag on the Gospel Book. If the bread was eaten by the afflicted, or the rag was worn against their body, it was thought to cure the disease. The name of each generation of priests is noted in the Gospel Book for over 35 generations. In the Armenian tradition, a family holy book was considered a living member of the family. However, in 1915 the book was unable to save 150 members of the extended Der Garabedian family who were slaughtered during the Armenian Genocide, and the Gospel book was seized. The local family survivor, Garabed Hairik Der Garabedian, was forced to ransom back the book, and pass it on to his nephew Krikor Der Garabedian, who was working in America during the Genocide, with instruction to pass it on to his own children. Krikor and his wife Baytzar had three daughters, but no daughter had children to continue the line. Concerned that the Gospel Book would become an orphan after 39 generations, the last surviving daughter, Julia Der Garabedian, entrusted the book to the Armenian Museum as its new family.

The Garabed Gospel Book is made of 250 pages of goat skin, covered with leather-bound wooden covers. The text is in double columns in black ink with decorative figures on the page’s edges in red ink. The artistic style is relatively crude, typical of the Cilician style. The larger size of the book is also typical of this early period. In the later mature Cilician style, Gospel books are often small enough to be carried in one hand, with refined delicate artwork.

The story of the Garabed Gospel with all its complexity and intrigue; from a scribe who spent 11 years writing it, and eventually went blind,  its healing properties and, despite being seized during the Genocide, remaining within the same family for  hundreds of years, makes it  one of the most mysteriously haunting objects at the Armenian Museum.

Of the approximately 13,000 letters and documents in Hill-Stead Museum’s archive, the single subject that comprises the most volume is that of Psychical Research, a subject that intrigued Theodate Pope Riddle so much so that she spent countless hours and considerable sums of her personal wealth supporting the movement. In the mid-1800s, a wave of popular interest in Spiritualism spread across the United States and Europe. By the end of the century several forms of the craze had developed, some quite religious and others rather carnival-like. In the 1890s, some intellectuals and scientists began to study spiritualist phenomena such as “trance” in an attempt to understand altered states of consciousness, the apparent ability of some people to communicate thoughts without using language, and what happens to the human personality after death. These investigators called themselves “Psychical Researchers,” and philosopher William James was the most prominent American member of the group. It is unclear how Theodate came to know William James, but in 1904, through him, she and a close friend consulted the famed medium Leonora Piper to attempt to communicate with the friend’s recently deceased brother. The sittings, conducted in a “scientific” manner, were transcribed and some of the transcriptions are in the museum’s archives. Theodate and her friend “tested” the brother’s spirit by asking questions to which Mrs. Piper could not have known the answers. Later, around 1910, Theodate became involved with the American Society for Psychical Research, based in New York City. Eventually she broke with this group and attempted to establish a more scientifically rigorous rival organization based at Harvard. Her interest continued for years. 

Among the numerous transcriptions of sittings in the archives is one that gave several of us at Hill-Stead chills…

One page of a multipage transcription of a sitting that took place in London on September 9, 1938 shows the medium’s “control” speaking of Theodate’s father Alfred and her first foster son Gordon Brockway. Alfred Pope passed away in 1913 and Theodate took in Gordon in 1914 so the two never knew one another in life but were together in the afterlife with Alfred watching over Gordon, who had died of polio at aged four. The medium in this instance, Mrs. Nash, through her control, wrote Alfred’s name perfectly on the first attempt. Theodate’s handwritten note indicates that with Gordon’s name the control got the letters incorrect on the first try but the reverse of the page shows she got it right the second time around. What also came out in the sitting was that while Theodate was not Gordon’s birth mother he considered her his true mother and loved her dearly.