Adams, Elizabeth C. | "Study therefore and practice the Decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount"

Property of a New York Collector

Adams, Elizabeth C. 

Friendship album compiled by John Adams's granddaughter

Friendship album comprising 41 accomplished leaves in a bound quarto composition book(255 x 207 mm), compiled by John Adams's granddaughter Elizabeth Coombs Adams, containing a manuscript sentiment signed by John Adams dated 1822, an autograph poem signed by John Quincy Adams dated Quincy, 7 September 1823, and many other sentiments, poems, and reflections by family members and friends; first leaf cropped at top margin, epistolary address from Elizabeth's father torn and repaired at top, leaf with John Adams's signature detached, lightly soiled, and with marginal repair, a wormhole at lower inner margin affecting text on only 3 or 4 leaves. Half red roan over marbled boards, engraved portrait of John Adams affixed to front pastedown by John Quincy Adams (according to Elizabeth's note. "placed here by my uncle J Q A"); worn, repairs to spine and corners.

The friendship book of Elizabeth Coombs Adams, granddaughter of John Adams. Elizabeth was the daughter of Adams's youngest son Thomas Boylston and Ann Harrod. She collected these autographs from friends and family between 1822 and 1823 when she was 14 years old. The album includes a sentiment of deeply seated piety and religious devotion from her 87-year-old grandfather: "Virtue and Happiness are so intimately connected and so mutually dependent, that neither can exist without the other. Study therefore and practice the Decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount, and you can never be unhappy in this world or the other. From your affectionate Grandfather, John Adams." Adams's "faith in God and the hereafter remained unshaken. His fundamental creed, which he had reduced to a single sentence: ' He who loves the Workman and his work, and does what he can to preserve and improve it, shall be accepted of Him'" (McCullough, John Adams, p. 650). Earlier in 1820 as one of his last public acts, Adams found himself a delegate to a state convention called to revise the Massachusetts constitution. Adams proposed an amendment guaranteeing complete religious freedom in the commonwealth. If all were equal before the eyes God, so he reasoned that all should be free to worship God according to the practice of their respective faiths. The bill failed to pass.

The album also includes verses composed by her uncle John Quincy Adams, signed and dated Quincy, 7 September 1823, written in four eight-line stanzas. The poem begins: "When thou in distant days shalt look | Beloved Maid, this Volume through, | And on the pages of thy Book | Fair Friendship's Record shalt review; | There, when the future shall be past | May bliss uninterrup'd cheer they brow, | While thy never tiring mind shall cast | A thought on him who greets thee now," and concludes: "In Pain and Gladness let thy Mind | See but thy maker's varied power: | To dark affliction's hour resign'd, | Grateful for Pleasure's fleeting hour: | Let Time and Chance then o'er thy days | Had gloom, or radiance, smile or frown, | Thy getting Sun's expiring rays | In cloudless Splendour shall go down."

The album also includes two didactic letters composed by Elizabeth's parents, proferring advice on her education and moral comportment.

PROVENANCE:

Sotheby's New York, 21 June 2007 (undesignated consignor)