Notes to Lady Hamilton, Who Drove Admiral Nelson Wild - NYTimes.com

Emma Hamilton preserved a paper trail of her love affairs. As a teenager in the 1780s, she was passed around as a mistress among British aristocrats, and is perhaps most famous for running off to a London suburb with Adm. Horatio Nelson while they were each married to other people.

Nelson burned Lady Hamilton’s letters, but she hung on to his correspondence, including mail that arrived after he was killed in 1805 by a French sniper. Some of his prose, penned on battleships, sounds practically unhinged.

“Hush, my poor heart, keep in my breast, be calm,” he wrote her in 1801, worried that the Prince of Wales was trying to seduce her. Due to anxiety, the admiral added, “I have eat nothing but a little rice and drank water.”

Jean Kislak, a book collector in Miami, owns about 250 artifacts related to Lady Hamilton’s complicated life. Half of the collection goes on view on Wednesday in “The Enchantress: Emma, Lady Hamilton,” a show at the Grolier Club in Manhattan.

Mrs. Kislak started acquiring the material around 1986, drawn to the story of Lady Hamilton’s beginnings as the daughter of a provincial blacksmith; her stints as a courtesan, theater costuming assistant and pantomime dancer; and her rise through society, becoming a friend to the Queen of Naples, subject of dozens of portraits by the painter George Romney and the object of Nelson’s obsession.

“She had all the exciting elements necessary to whet my appetite” as a collector, Mrs. Kislak writes in the exhibition catalog.

Mrs. Kislak has traveled to Lady Hamilton’s haunts in Britain, Italy and France. In 1994 she financed construction of a stone obelisk honoring the “beloved friend of Admiral Lord Nelson” near Lady Hamilton’s unmarked grave in Calais, France. “We were trying to rest her soul,” Mrs. Kislak said in a recent phone interview.

Mrs. Kislak owns evidence of how men manipulated Lady Hamilton. In 1786 William Hamilton, a British diplomat, brought her to Naples, pretending to be platonically chaperoning her travels. But he was actually intent on “possessing so delightfull an object under my roof,” he wrote to his nephew, Charles Greville, Lady Hamilton’s previous lover. Hamilton married her in 1791, two years before she met Nelson.

The Grolier Club has borrowed Mrs. Kislak’s 1810s ceramic thimble and drawer pull printed with Nelson’s portrait; alluring Romney paintings of Lady Hamilton in white robes; and a mahogany cot that Nelson and Lady Hamilton acquired for their daughter, Horatia.

“I shall be sure of your prayers for my safety, conquest and speedy return,” Nelson wrote to Horatia a few days before his death.

Mrs. Kislak paid about $61,000 for the cot at Sotheby’s in London in 2005. “It has a mystique and an excitement about it,” she said. Last month, at Sotheby’s in New York, she spent $12,500 on two Romney sketches of an unnamed seated woman. “I know it’s Emma,” Mrs. Kislak said.

She was outbid in 2002, she added regretfully, when Nelson’s diamond brooch, shaped like an anchor, brought about $250,000 at Sotheby’s in London. She has heard that the current owner has turned down offers in the $300,000 range, perhaps because of Lady Hamilton’s allure.

“She’s got her spell over these people,” Mrs. Kislak said.

‘PLANTATION’ ARTIST NAMED

In 1935 a painting of slaves dancing by a river arrived at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. The watercolor, titled “The Old Plantation,” has been reproduced for thousands of books and Web sites as an early view of Southern life. But for decades the artist, date and subject matter were a mystery.

A few months ago, Susan P. Shames (pronounced SHAY-mus), a librarian at Colonial Williamsburg, concluded that around 1790, the South Carolina plantation owner John Rose painted his own riverfront rice fields near Beaufort. For proof, she spent a year poring over census records, church and courthouse archives, gravestone inscriptions and defunct newspapers like The Southern Christian Advocate and The South-Carolina Gazette.

“There can be no other reasonable interpretation of the artist’s identity,” she writes in a new book, “The Old Plantation: The Artist Revealed” (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation). On Feb. 19, Colonial Williamsburg will display the painting at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum with two other works attributed to Rose. Wall labels explain the detective work, including analysis of Rose’s paper watermarks and his handwriting in court documents.

The watercolor originally came to Colonial Williamsburg via Holger Cahill, a folk art scholar who was sent on buying trips for Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. At an antiques store in Columbia, S.C., he paid $20 for the painting and then apparently named it “The Old Plantation.” In 1976 two elderly sisters from the Copes family in South Carolina told Colonial Williamsburg that their relatives had owned it and described it as an ancestor’s depiction of his own property.

Ms. Shames found that a Copes forebear, John Rose, was indeed a noted watercolorist who kept dozens of slaves along a riverbank.

For the exhibition, Colonial Williamsburg is also showing from its collection a portrait of an elderly slave named Miss Breme Jones. In Rose’s cursive handwriting, the image bears a quotation from Milton’s poetry about a woman treading slowly with “Dignity and Love.”

The Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston is lending a watercolor of Tranquil Hill, a plantation near Rose’s home; fluffy trees and grass tufts in the Gibbes scene resemble the landscape in “The Old Plantation.”

Ms. Shames, who kept her research secret even from colleagues until she was ready to publish, has already heard from a naysayer or two. She has been told that the background hill contours in “The Old Plantation” could not have existed near Rose’s fields. “There’ll always be skeptics,” she said.

LENA HORNE ESTATE SALE

The singer Lena Horne, who died last year, kept decades’ worth of sequined costumes and chunky jewelry. On Feb. 23 Doyle New York will auction 198 lots from her estate. Her 1970s ocher caftans ($200 to $400 for a pair) are studded with mirrors and lace, and rhinestone ivy trails down a set of a necklace and earrings ($750 to $1,000). Books byLangston Hughes ($300 to $500 for three) are inscribed to her:

“Loved your songs tonight,” he wrote in 1950.

The family has not decided what to do with the rest of her archive. “It will be a huge job” to sort through, said Gail Lumet Buckley, Horne’s daughter.