On June 1, 2013, Brown’s John Hay Library — built in 1910 and now home to the Library’s special collections — will close its doors for a major renovation of the first floor. (Updates on the project can be followed on the John Hay Library Renovation website and blog.) Many of the materials that Digital Production Services regularly captures, especially those from signature collections, are housed at “the Hay,” named after the Brown alumnus (1838–1905).
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Photograph of John Hay, taken at the time of his marriage to Clara Stone (1874) by an unknown photographer.
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Sargent’s portrait of Hay (detail), featured on the cover of a newly published biography.
Earlier this month, a substantial new biography of John Hay was published by Simon & Schuster (see a recent review from the New York Times). Several images featured in the book were captured by Digital Production Services, including the John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) portrait used for the book’s cover, a photograph of a young John Hay, and a portrait of his wife, Clara Stone Hay.
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Clara Stone Hay by Anders Zorn (1860–1920); gift of Stuart Symington.
Apart from his connections to Brown, Hay was Abraham Lincoln’s secretary and a diplomat under Theodore Roosevelt. The Library’s online exhibit from 2008, “John Hay’s Lincoln and Lincoln’s John Hay,” curated by American Historical Collections Librarian Holly Snyder, highlights the Hay-Lincoln connection by way of additional original documents — now stored at the Hay.
