Please join us for a gallery talk with Laura F. Sprague, senior consulting curator, Bowdoin College Museum of Art. She will share observations about Henry Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne and their influence on nineteenth-century American visual culture. Following the gallery talk will be a tour of Before They Were Famous: The Student Days of the Class of 1825 with Kat Stefko, Director of Special Collections & Archives, in the Hawthorne-Longefellow Library.

This event is presented in conjunction with Poetic Truths: Hawthorne, Longfellow, and American Visual Culture, 1840-1880, on view February 6 through July 20, 2025 at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and Before They Were Famous: The Student Days of the Class of 1825, on view at the Hawthorne-Longfellow Library, Bowdoin College through June 6, 2025.

Free and open to the public; no registration is required. The talk will begin at 12:00 p.m. in the Museum’s Pavilion.

Images:
Left: Charles Osgood, Portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne,1840, oil on canvas; Courtesy, Peabody- Essex Museum.
Right: Margaret F. Foley, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1866, marble; Courtesy, McGuigan Collection.