Just back from a weekend in Lambertville, New Jersey!  You may have read my previous post  earlier this year about Frenchtown, New Jersey, which is very near Lambertville.  Though I've now been to Frenchtown half a dozen times I'd never been to Lambertville, and now I can report that it's as lovely and charming as people had told me.

According to the Lambertville Historical Society website, what is now the "city" (really, it's just a village) was originally purchased from the Delaware Indians as a portion of a 150,000 acre tract along the Delaware River north of Trenton.  The purchase price was about $2,800, and over the years the council of West Jersey subdivided and sold the land to farmers and developers.  The first resident of Lambertville was John Holcombe, who built the stone house on North Main Street that became known as Washington's Headquarters (one of many, obviously!).  In 1732, a fellow named Emanuel Coryell obtained a charter to operate a ferry crossing the Delaware River slightly south of the present Lambertville-New Hope (Pennsylvania) Bridge.  He also operated a tavern and an inn, and at the time these settlements (Lambertville and New Hope) were simply called Coryell's Ferry.  Lambertville was the mid-point on the two-day journey between New York and Philadelphia.    

Coryell's estate was divided among his four sons when he passed away and by the early 1800s the property had been subdivided.  In 1812, a wooden bridge was constructed across the Delaware River and Bridge Street was established.  In the same year, Captain John Lambert built a stone tavern and inn on Bridge Street, which today is Lambertville House, a very nice inn where I stayed this weekend.

In 1830, the Delaware and Raritan Canal Company began building and operating a canal to connect the Raritan and Delaware Rivers, and this 44-mile canal  follows the river to Trenton.  By 1849, Lambertville was incorporated and was home to 1,417 people.  Things rather boomed for a while, but the flood of 1903 -- which caused enormous damage and swept the covered bridge away (the iron one there now dates from 1904) -- began a spiral of unfortunate events (including the abandonment of the Delaware and Raritan Canal by the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1937) and the town fell into decline.  Happily, Lambertville was "discovered" again in the 1970s and '80s, and a lot of beautiful buildings and the canal path have been restored, and lots of galleries, antique shops, and unique boutiques have opened up.

The Inn at Lambertville Station has an enviable position right on the canal (and also has several options for eating and drinking), but Lambertville House is less of a hustle-and-bustle kind of place, and each of the guest rooms is named after a local personality.  I stayed in the Edward Redfield (1869-1965) room on the 4th floor, and I didn't realize that Redfield was an American Impressionist painter and a member of the art colony in New Hope (in fact, as he was the first painter to move to the area he is considered to be a co-founder of the artist colony, with William Langson Lathrop).  Redfield studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and at the Academie Julian and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and today some of his work is in the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Meeting the owners of the Lambertville retailers was a treat, and among those I particularly enjoyed were at June's Antiques (37 Coryell Street), Panoply Books (48 N. Union Street), the Antiques Center at The People's Store (28 N. Union Street), The Chocolate Box (really beautiful shop at 39 North Union, e-mail: info@chocolateboxusa.com) and the Tomasello Winery shop (1 North Union), where I tasted (and bought) a terrific, dry rose called Summer Solstice, absolutely perfect for the hot weather we've been having.

On Sunday, my husband and our traveling companions drove north, mostly following the river, to Frenchtown, where we (again) had a terrific lunch at the Lovin' Oven and enjoyed wandering (again) around Two Buttons, the fantastic Asian emporium owned by author Elizabeth Gilbert and her husband.  If you go, don't miss The Buddha Wall, a huge stone carving from Indonesia that depicts the Last Temptation of the Buddha (the Wall is at the edge of the Lovin' Oven's outdoor patio).

Lambertville House

A National Historic Inn

32 Bridge Street / (609) 397.0200 / http://www.lambertvillehouse.com/

Detail from ‘The Resurrection of Lazarus,’ 1896, by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937), in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay, photo by Hervé Lewandoswki

'View of the Seine, Looking Toward Notre Dame' 1896 by Henry Ossawa Tanner, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York, http://www.michaelrosenfeldart.com/.

Last weekend was filled with some wonderful treats: one of them was the very well done exhibit, Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts -- the two images above are from paintings featured in the show. Tanner is not as well known as he deserves to be, but in brief, he was the son of a third generation freed man from Pittsburgh and a former slave who escaped to freedom on the underground railroad. Tanner decided at a young age to pursue his dream of being an artist, and he attended the Academy of Fine Arts and was fortunate to work under the best American artists of the time, including Thomas Eakins, who was to become a mentor to Tanner. In 1891, Tanner traveled to Europe, and he noted that in Paris, "no one regards me curiously...I am simply 'M. Tanner, an American artist.' Nobody knows or cares what was the complexion of my forbears. I live and work there on terms of absolute social equality." 'The Resurrection of Lazarus' was accepted in the Salon of 1896, and as the accompanying exhibit brochure states, "Tanner's career became international news...He won a medal and became one of only a handful of American artists collected by the French government." Among other works in the show I particularly liked are 'The Arch,' (1919), 'Christ and His Mother Studying the Scriptures' (1909; his wife Jessie and their son were the models for this painting, which is in the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art), and 'Interior of a Mosque, Cairo' (1897).

In the first edition of my Paris book, I included an entry on 'African-Americans in Paris' in the 'Renseignements Pratiques' section (renamed 'A Paris Miscellany' in my more recent edition). I wrote that "especially in the 1950s and sixties, but also for many years before that, there was an important community of African-American artists and writers in Paris. Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Chester Himes, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Henry Tanner, Langston Hughes, to name just a few, were all in Paris, a city where as Richard Wright has written, "your color is the least important thing about you."" I also noted that I'd seen a great exhibit in 1996 at the Studio Museum in Harlem entited "Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists in Paris, 1945-1965" and the accompanying catalog includes essays and excerpts about the Paris art word in the twenties and thirties. A related work that's also a good read is From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980 (Michel Fabre, University of Illinois Press, 1991), and a wonderful article to read is "Chez Tournon: A Homage" by Paule Marshall, The Sophisticated Traveler edition of The New York Times Magazine, 18 October, 1982.

My husband, daughter, and I took a different route from New York to Philadelphia, and we drove through the charming town of Frenchtown, New Jersey. The route happened to be prettier, more interesting, and a little shorter, but the reason we chose it is because my daughter has been pestering us to go a cafe called the Lovin' Oven, which she'd learned about from a show on the Food Network called 'The Best Thing I Ever Ate.' The "best thing" was a chocolate salted caramel pie ($6 a slice, $50 for the whole pie), and I can officially claim it was without doubt one of the very best desserts I have ever eaten on the planet. Though we only stopped to get slices of the pie to go, I took a sample menu with me and we definitely plan on having a meal there -- the menu is packed with local, seasonal dishes and looks fantastic. As writer Tammy La Gorce noted in The New York Times in 2010, the husband-and-wife owners Julie Klein and Mike Quinn "already had a loyal following" before they moved the cafe from Milford to Frenchtown. "The couple's commitment to cooking with local ingredients and to baking on the premises, including the beloved sweet potato biscuits, has earned it the devotion of locavores as well as those who never end a meal without dessert."

And, Lovin' Oven is right next to (a part of the same building, actually) Two Buttons, the cool mostly Asian-inspired home furnishings store owned by Elizabeth Gilbert (author of Eat, Pray, Love) and her husband, Jose Nunes, who lease the space to Lovin' Oven (open Wednesday to Saturday 8 to 9; Sunday from 8 to 3; closed on Monday and Tuesday). If you're interested, Lovin' Oven is offering a great Valentine's Day menu with lots of choices for $60 per person. Note no credit cards or reservations are accepted, and it's B.Y.O.B. If you have to wait a while you can get lost in the cavernous Two Buttons.