I am particularly fond of the literary technique of inverted narrative. Simply, this is to tell a story by starting at the end. The story of the paper’s arrival in Fort Worth, Texas—what is referred to as provenance (the chain of ownership from the creation of the object to the present) in archives and museum parlance, is a series of twists and turns across two centuries.

As the Amon Carter Museum of American Art’s longtime archivist, I have worked with most of our manuscript collections—processing them so they are ready to be used by researchers. In March of 2008 I was contacted by a researcher working on a family biography, who inquired what we had on her great grandfather—Clair James Grece, for whom we had a brief biographical file in our research collection. I copied and mailed her what little we had (this was still the age of physical mailings) and thought nothing more of it as just one of many routine research requests we get.

To my perpetual regret I failed to question why we might have a file on Grece. The museum is a United States based museum focusing on the art of this nation, from roughly 1800 to today. Grece was an English settler in Canada, who had painted Canadian landscapes—wrong country of origin and subject. In April of 2008. I was working through our backlog of papers waiting to be processed and came across a small parcel of manuscript books. I was naturally intrigued. Upon perusal I discovered that they were the diaries of two brothers, Englishmen named Constable, who had visited the United States in 19^th century. All of a sudden my failure in critical thinking became readily apparent. The researcher from the month before had mentioned that Grece was a nephew of two brothers named Constable.

Much embarrassed I contacted the researcher, admitting that we owned the papers and two watercolors by the Constable brothers, and they bore a note on the back of one of them by Grece. They had been sitting unknown in our backlog since 1974. A lot of two watercolors, and a random assortment of manuscripts had been purchased at auction in Canada by a collector, and subsequently given to the museum. We had accepted them because they depicted two areas of the early Untied States—a view of the Falls of the Mohawk and a section of the Mississippi river. We had known next to nothing about the artists, except the note by Grece on the back. The paintings had been in the collection ever since, but since we did not have an special collections archives in 1974, the manuscripts had gone into the library backlog.

I had failed to connect the art collection’s two watercolors by artists Daniel and William Constable to the researcher’s Clair James Grece. The researcher was exceptionally gracious as I laid out my story. We exchanged a series of emails that filled in biographical details about the brothers and the papers. They had passed to Grece, as neither brother had living children, and subsequently passed down the generations, making a leap across the Atlantic with a branch of the family in the early 1960s. Passing out of their hands, and sold at the auction in the 1970s then given to us. The family had lost track of them, knowing only that they had been given to a museum in Texas. The researcher had been cold contacting museums for several years seeking them.

Having rediscovered them, and with my sincere assurances they would languish no longer, I asked what she wanted from them. She was working on her book, so copies were supplied, but more importantly, she had a story of her own. William had lived a long life and wrote of his America journeys. In 1858, he wrote,

I do not affect to believe my drawings a worthless production… They might well have been better—I have made them as well I could. I take no blame to myself that their merits are so small, but I am satisfied that, like good wine, they will increase in interest if not value with age, and, if there should be as much pains taken in the their preservation as I have used in their construction, they may probably last through several centuries…. It may not be too much to expect that, at the end of a century or two, these drawings, unpretentious as they are, may become valuable, not as works of art but as a record of the aspects of scenes in various places of North America as they were early in the 19^th century before the advent of man but long since passed away, and visible otherwise only through a misty tradition. So I hope that you, my reader, will be one amongst others to take care of them.

Her interest in the material was for research, but also to fulfill her great-great-granduncle’s desire, enumerated in his will in 1861, that the diaries and drawings be in America as a unique document of the nation’s early history.

To that end, as two volumes of the diaries were still in England, she was going to gift the remaining elements to the museum to reunite the collection and fulfill the wish made 147 years before by her ancestor. The brothers likely would never have guessed that their records would end up in Texas, which was part of the Spanish Empire when they first visited and an independent country when William came back thirty years later. But they knew they had experienced something special and wished it preserved and cared for posterity so that it could be seen by subsequent generations. This project hopes, in a small way, to fulfill a portion of this noble desire.