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Earliest Members of the Century Association

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Frederic Crowninshield

Artist/Author

Centurion, 1890–1918

Born 27 November 1845 in Boston, Massachusetts

Died 11 September 1918 in Capri, Italy

Buried Campo Cestio, Rome, Lazio, Italy

Proposed by J. Hampden Robb, Richard H. Derby, and John Q. A. Ward

Elected 5 April 1890 at age forty-four

Century Memorial

Among the artists of the Century, the roll-call of 1918 has numbered six. Frederick Crowninshield, a Harvard graduate of the sixties, spent the first decade of his active life in Europe; exhibiting at the Paris Salon, first in 1878. Returning to America, after a few years as instructor in painting and decorative art at Boston, he was drawn twenty-two years ago, like so many other masters in his craft, to the artist community of New York, where he joined the Century after four years’ residence in the city. It was in New York that he bent himself to his exquisite work in stained glass, perpetuated in memorial windows of numerous halls and churches. This work his Club associates and the general public knew well. Not so many knew of Crowninshield’s poetry; the pleasing lines in his “Under the Laurel,” in which the sonnet to the Century, “that leafy islet on a sterile sea,” spoke the affection of the artist for this Club. His winter and summer homes on West End Avenue and at Stockbridge were centers of artistic reunions, and the Century was his social home; but he died in the Capri which he loved.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1919 Century Association Yearbook