Past Perfect: Among the Gods

The American painter, photographer and diplomat William James Stillman (1828-1901) knew just about everyone who was anyone. He befriended Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other pre-Raphaelite painters, traveled with art critic John Ruskin in Switzerland and crossed the Atlantic on the same ship as the singer Jenny Lind. He spent summers in the Adirondacks with the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, historian Charles Eliot Norton and geologist Louis Agassiz, and he numbered the poets James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow among his friends. The youngest of nine children born to the owner of a machine shop in Schenectady, New York, Stillman graduated from Union College in 1848. The following year he studied landscape painting under Frederick Church; then he sailed to Europe to continue his studies. When Stillman returned to the United States in 1855, he took a job as the fine-arts editor of the New York Evening Post and co-founded The Crayon, a short-lived art journal. He took up photography in 1859; a decade later he took the photographs of the Acropolis that appear on the following pages. After stints as American consul to Italy and Crete, Stillman spent his last decades working as a roving photographer, amateur archaeologist, painter and correspondent. He died in Surrey, England, at the age of 73.