Message from the Director
BOARD OF ADVISORS
Kathleen Beaulieu
Herta Cuneo
Matthew Dattilo
Patrick Dorsey, S.J.
Marsha Goldstein
Nevin Hedlund
Virginia Hogan
Vadim Katznelson
Maureen Lampert
Ellen Landgraf
Peter LoGiudice
Darlene Markovich
Judy McCaskey
Denis McNamara
Emily Nixon
Denise Noell
Francesca Parvizyar
René Romero Schuler
Maria Simon
Gayle Tilles
Debra Yates
EX-OFFICIO:
Pamela E. Ambrose
Director of Cultural Affairs
Loyola University Chicago
Rev. Michael J. Garanzini, S.J.
President and CEO
Loyola University Chicago
Dear LUMA Members,
The director’s column this spring is dedicated to new and
renewing members of the museum. We appreciate your support
and look forward to your lives and spirits being enriched by
LUMA’s exhibitions and programming.
In each edition of
The LUMANARY
,
I focus on a different topic.
This issue features a bit of a travelogue that relates to our Martin
D’Arcy, S.J. Collection and the upcoming exhibition
Crossings
and Dwellings: Restored Jesuits, Women Religious, and the
American Experience, 1814–2014
.
Stonyhurst College is a name that appears in the history of 22
objects in the D’Arcy Collection. After years of correspondence
with Dr. Jan Graffius, the Curator of Collections at Stonyhurst,
I thought it was time to travel to England to the tiny hamlet of
Hurst Glen about 200 miles northwest of London. Hurst Glen is
barely a sign on the side of road in green and rocky Lancashire,
on the cusp of England’s Lake District—just two small inns, a
luncheonette, and what I called the “hearties” (people mucking
about looking every part of English hearty souls in their
Wellingtons and Barbour jackets). The inn in which I stayed, the
Shireburn Arms, is named after the medieval landowners of the
original college property, Stonyhurst Hall. It was everything I
hoped a quaint inn would be with its coffered ceilings, a friendly
pub, dogs before the fireplace, and sheep out back. Up the hill
from the inn and out of sight is Stonyhurst College, the imposing
Jesuit co-ed preparatory school. This striking edifice with its
extensive grounds could be from the PBS series
Downton Abbey
or the film
Gosford Park
,
eliciting a mouth-gaping “Wow!” when
first seen from the Avenue, the school’s long driveway. The rolling
landscape around Stonyhurst is Hobbit country; it is said that J. R.
R. Tolkien wrote
The Hobbit
while staying in one of the college’s
stone outbuildings. The area—as I learned from the friendly
innkeepers—is full of stories, some quite fanciful and some
quite wicked.
Cover Image:
Marriage Casket, ca. 1450, Workshop of Baldassare degli Embriachi, Italian (Venetian),
bone, horn, ebony, and intarsia, gift of Mr. Solomon Byron Smith, 1980-06
