At Phillips Academy, artist Stuart Travis created three large, decorative, historic, cartographic murals: one in the Oliver Wendell Holmes Library, one in the Robert S. Peabody Institute of Archaeology, and one that originally hung in Evans Hall and and is now in the Gelb Science Center. Other elegant and distinctive Travis legacies here include the Cochran Bird Sanctuary gates, the library’s striking nautilus bookplate, and the Peabody’s intricate model of a Pecos tribal community.
The library’s Freeman Room mural, which is a historical map of Phillips Academy and the Town of Andover, has been restored, with financial support provided by the Abbot Academy Fund, in 1994 by conservator Christie Cunningham-Adams and again in 2018 by conservator Gianfranco Pacobene. Restoration of the mural brought the original vibrancy back to this warm and dignified space. The concept for this work was the brainchild of Academy benefactor Thomas Cochran, who offered the commission in 1928 to Travis, a New York artist with cache in wealthy circles. A meticulous craftsman, designer, illustrator and mapmaker, Travis had already applied his cartographic and artistic skills to the interiors of large private yachts and elegant steamships, which displayed them proudly.
The record is unclear on whether Cochran had admired Travis’ work on a fellow financier’s yacht or a steamship cruise he may have taken or whether he knew of him through Charles Platt, modern Andover’s architect, who had studied with Travis at Julian Academy. In any case, Cochran, had a penchant for becoming enamoured with a work, a design or a concept and then bringing it to Andover Hill to advance his dream of creating a visually stunning place in which to learn. While contemporaries were pouring cash into colleges and universities, Cochran felt adolescence was so formative that to overlook them was a mistake.
Shy and retiring, but not without a humorous side, Travis was just the person to help fulfill Cochran’s vision of a campus environment embodying poet John Keats’ idea that a thing of beauty is a joy forever.
Arriving on Andover Hill in 1928 to begin his painstaking research for the pictorial history, he found a group of sympathetic and patient men with access to Cochran’s deep pockets. Under the patronage of these “modern Medici,” as James Sawyer, treasurer of the Academy, called them, Travis weathered personal and financial maelstroms and stayed on to serve as a kind of permanent artist-in-residence, living and working at Andover off and on for the rest of his life. The partnership of Cochran’s renaissance ideas and Travis’ selfless devotion to craft, coupled with the artist’s extensive knowledge of materials, Sawyer observed, proved a “marriage for all time.”
Travis’ work around the campus in the late 1920s and 1930s contributed significantly to Cochran’s scheme and constituted the crowning achievement of Travis’ career. By the time Travis died on Christmas afternoon in 1942, he had left a lasting legacy on Andover Hill.
Upon the installation of the library map—the gateway to his work at the Academy—the press reported that Travis was “alone responsible for the survival of the art of cartography in a country in which the love of beauty is rapidly giving place to the devotion to materialism.”
Although the design and aesthetic decisions involved in the mural were Travis’ alone, Cochran and the Academy intervened with characteristic attention to detail and control in its initial planning. One fundamental disagreement centered on the inclusion of the town’s early history. Sawyer, writing to Travis in December 1928, stated clearly, “I have consulted…Mr. Cochran and Mr. Platt, and we are now all in agreement that it is…appropriate that the map should deal exclusively with the history of Phillips Academy. A historical map of the town of Andover of 100 years ago opens up every possibility of a difference of opinion as to the accuracy of many facts and locations. The more important and controlling reason is that the map is intended primarily to impress the student body with the history, tradition, and background of the school of which they are members.”
Going on to suggest that melding the two histories would dilute each to the detriment of the final product, Sawyer outlined some major events linking to our national heritage that had helped shape the Academy and should be illustrated in the mural. Among them were the signing by patriot John Hancock of the school’s act of incorporation in 1780; Paul Revere’s design of the Academy seal in 1782; George Washington’s address to students on the Phillips Academy training field on November 5, 1789; and French General Lafayette’s visit to Andover in 1825. He also listed Samuel Smith’s writing the lyrics to the hymn “America” in 1832 when he was a theological student living in what is now America House as well as Oliver Wendell Holmes’ reading of his poem about his Andover days, “The School Boy,” at the academy centennial in 1878. All these events are depicted in the Travis mural.
The suggestion of excluding town history from the work did not sit well with Travis. Writing to Sawyer, Travis insisted, “[My] contract with Mr. Cochran calls for a map of Phillips Academy with the village of Andover as the background, [and] that is what he asked me to do…the academy will show prominently in the foreground…superimposed against Andover.”
On Jan. 24, 1929, Sawyer softened the Academy’s position in a letter to Travis. “In regard to the map,” he wrote, “we feel that it should be confined wholly to Phillips Academy, but, of course, this does not mean that we should not have some of the
Andover village as a background.” On November 25, 1929, Travis wrote to Cochran that, when the map was unveiled, it proved of great interest to the townspeople, owing in part to the coverage of the installation by the Andover Townsman, the local newspaper. Travis added that as he put the finishing touches on the map he was barraged with comments and questions by “old timers,” both men and women. Loath to ignore a research opportunity, Travis indicated he had made additions and corrections as a direct result of the locals’ interest and had eavesdropped on discussions of hotly debated topics like “where Squire Abbott’s wife’s nephew lived after he left PA just before he went to Maracaibo in 1850….” He even told of encountering an indignant woman whose great-aunt’s house and genealogy Travis had omitted, thus putting an end to speculation about whether the residents of Andover would be interested in the project.
Beyond expressing satisfaction in the interest shown by local residents, Travis commented with pleasure on the students’ unswerving curiosity during and after the map’s installation. Even in 1930, learning from images rather than books apparently stimulated young men. Travis astutely appreciated the appeal of seeing and reading a terse, illuminating text. The memories and stories the mural evoked were recorded over time by the librarians and eventually presented to Travis, who predicted the map would become a valuable local historical document.
Reflected in the map is Travis’ conviction that Phillips Academy is part of the town of Andover and not vice versa. The central bird’s-eye view is of the town, showing Phillips Academy circa 1830 surrounded by historic vignettes. The trompe l’oeil plaques scattered through the mural commemorate images, events, and persons significant in the history of the school and, by extension, the town.
Scenes inset throughout the mural tell a history beyond names and faces. Views of Andover’s first instructor, Eliphalet Pearson, and the first 13 pupils out for a walk, of principal Osgood Johnson stopping to chat with students at the Commons on Phillips Street, of commencement in the early 1830s, and of the steam railroad finally reaching Andover in 1835 remind us of our rich and colorful past. The mural teaches us not only of historical events but of habits of dress and local icons. Travis even included a bluebird once prevalent in the Andover area.
Four panels of pressed paper academy board hold these images, fashioned from an unusual combination of oil paint, resinous tempera, ink, oil glazes and gold leaf, challenging any restorer. The arrangement of the pictorial details seems to have emerged as the artist worked. Numerous “pentimenti,” or artistic revisions, indicate that Travis changed his mind about where to place some images during execution. A close look at the lower right quadrant of the bird’s-eye view reveals the repositioning of several houses. A visual liveliness results from Travis’ application of various materials. The build-up of paint on the faux plaques seems an attempt to have them appear as actual three-dimensional plaques affixed to the surface.
Many items and documents in the Phillips Academy archives today provided source material for Travis: the original plaster mold for Paul Revere’s seal, engravings and photographs of early campus buildings, portraits of academy educators, letters and documents. In Travis’ artist’s notebooks we find page after page of notes pertaining to information presented in the mural.
More important than the recorded details, of course, is Travis’ fine design. Look at the depiction of Samuel Phillips Hall and note the visual effect Travis created by its location. What seems a symmetrical composition is carefully balanced to appear static, but it is the dynamic between what is there and what seems to be there that hooks us. The compass device, not new to Travis, not only is fascinating to look at but provides a resting place for the eye as we explore the panorama. The overall visual integrity of the mural is such that the viewer is not immediately aware of the four-panel construction. The fastening strips, along with the impression of the seal, fit inconspicuously into the overall design. The foliage on both sides provides a curtain for the map, promoting the viewer’s aerial orientation. The angular view of George Washington Hall, Pearson and Morse Hall helps us to enter the story.
While resident on campus during installation, Travis took his meals with the boys at the Bulfinch dining hall, which he described as a page from “Tom Brown’s Schooldays.” He felt the students’ endless fascination with detailed anecdotal history probably developed as a diversion from their dreary studies. A gold mine of detailed information, Travis must have impressed the boys, for some began to ask where they could take art courses!
Travis’ art comes out of a tradition long in suspension. He frets about the introduction and the dominance of the machine in American culture, in which quantity and mass production supercede quality. In a 1921 interview in the periodical Arts and Decoration Travis articulated his artistic philosophy and his reverence for artistic labor and for “something higher than ourselves.” In correspondence with Cochran, he also alluded to what he called the “human side of art.” It was his belief that anything machine-made has no soul and that art, to be valid, must be entirely hand-wrought. He advocated borrowing the time-tested traditions of international cultures but insisted on culturally personalizing the work, voicing one’s own soul or spirit. The work that goes into art, he argued, is to be revered, driven by that which is beyond knowing with specificity. Travis would agree that we must liberate ourselves from the machine and return to the higher calling, following the human urge to create without the “canker of haste.”
Starting as a book illustrator and trained as an architect, Travis designed and executed a range of work beyond what we have on Andover Hill including quaint garden wells and sumptuously sculpted and painted rooms as well as intricate and elegant metal work.
Estranged from his family for undetermined reasons (his brother learned not only of his death, but of his whereabouts for the previous decade and a half, through the artist’s obituary in the New York Times), Travis left his creative legacy and his worldly possessions to Phillips Academy. Dying in a nursing home of sorts in Andover just as the first Andover casualty in World War II was reported, he was with his surrogate family, the sole source of his financial and emotional support for the last 15 years of his life. He is buried in the Chapel Cemetery on campus.
by Ruth Quattlebaum, former Phillips Academy archivist, 2002