The conservator gently rolled a cotton swab across the painting's surface. The swab quickly blackened as it absorbed nearly two centuries of grime. Underneath the accumulated layers of varnish, dust, and linseed oil, an eye gradually came into focus. Long lost underneath the dull brown varnish, a portrait was beginning to emerge.Scott Nolley of Fine Art Conservation of Virginia was performing a test cleaning on a small square of a portrait of Edgar Allan Poe's literary executor, biographer, and enemy Rufus Wilmot Griswold (1815–1857). The Poe Museum in Richmond had recently acquired the piece as part of a collection of Griswold documents, and the museum is now preparing to make these artifacts available to the public for the first time. The visit to the conservator's studio in July 2016 was only one small step in a long journey that began in 1840 in New York.Griswold was about twenty-five years old when he and his wife, Caroline Searles Griswold (1824–1842), sat to have their portraits painted by Charles Loring Elliott (1812–1868). The couple had married three years earlier, and the marriage would end a little over two years later with Caroline's death on November 23, 1842. So devastated was Griswold's by his wife's sudden death that he refused to leave her side for thirty hours, when a relative forced him to come home. Forty days after her funeral, he returned to her crypt to cut a lock of her hair, kiss her cold lips, and spend the night with her.A month after her death, he wrote a poem that begins, A day of joy to all the world is this,But unto me, alas! a day of gloom;For she who was the fountain of my blissIs hid from me forever in the tomb.“A happy Christmas!” comes from many a voice,—'T is kindly meant,—it brings me only pain,—She who alone could bid my soul rejoice,Oh, wo is me! I ne'er shall see again!Written on mourning stationery, the manuscript for this poem is among the nearly four dozen handwritten documents included in the museum's acquisition, which also includes newspaper clippings and a copy of a history of the Griswold family written by his grandson. The original life portraits of Rufus Griswold and his wife, Caroline, are, however, the most spectacular pieces in the lot.Griswold himself must have been pleased with these portraits since he later commissioned Elliott to paint another, slightly smaller, picture of him that Griswold bequeathed to the New-York Historical Society. Griswold also hired Elliott to paint William Cullen Bryant in 1854.About a year after he and his wife had their portraits painted, Griswold met Poe, the struggling poet with whom he would forever be linked. Griswold rose to fame with the publication of his anthology The Poets and Poetry of America in 1842. Much to Poe's disappointment, the book contained only three of his poems while including dozens of examples by other poets. When Poe died in 1849, Griswold secured his place in Poe's history by writing an obituary in the October 9, 1849, issue of the New York Daily Tribune that begins, “Edgar Allan Poe is dead … This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it.” Both this widely circulated obituary and his infamous biography of Poe tarnished the author's reputation by portraying him as a misanthropic scoundrel and madman who likely based his darkest terror tales on personal experience. More than anyone else, Griswold created the Poe myth now omnipresent in popular culture.After Griswold's death in 1857, his oldest daughter, Emily (1838–1906), inherited the Elliott's portraits of him and his wife. Emily Griswold had already died once, when her train sank into a river in 1853 but she somehow revived six hours after being declared dead. After her father's one and only death, she moved to Africa where she married the missionary and artist Benjamin Hartley (1837–1912) in 1865. After almost all the other missionaries in their village died from the “African fever,” the Hartleys returned to the United States where he served as a minister in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Kansas, and Colorado before settling in Los Angeles in 1893. It was likely during these repeated moves that the Griswold portraits were removed from their original frame stretchers so they could be rolled up for easy transport and storage during the Hartleys' many moves. This process left a series of long cracks across the surface of the paintings.Emily Griswold Hartley left the canvases to her son, the dramatist and librettist Randolph Wakeman Hartley (1870–1931), who wrote a forty-four-page history of the Griswold and Hartley families for his son. Judging by the style of the frames and stretchers, the paintings were finally unrolled, restretched, and reframed in the 1920s during his ownership. The paintings were not cleaned at this time, however, so the paint applied over the cracks was mixed to match the dirty paint rather than the original colors. That the inpainting was performed over the varnish is apparent in photographs taken by Nolley under ultraviolet illumination. In the resulting images, the organic natural resin varnish fluoresces while the patches of inorganic pigments painted on top of the varnish appear black because they absorb all the ultraviolet rays. As seen in the photos, the patches were somewhat clumsily applied and cover much of the original paint.In addition to the haphazard retouching of the paintings, the restorer or framer did not center the images correctly on the new stretchers. Consequently, some of the image area is wrapped around the edge of the stretcher while bare canvas, which should have been wrapped around the side of the stretcher and hidden under the frame, is visible at the lower edge. In the case of the Rufus Griswold portrait, the canvas was so badly aligned that the conservator secured it by driving a nail through the surface of the painting where there is not enough canvas to wrap around the edge of the stretcher.Much of this damage is already apparent by 1943, when reproductions of the photographs appeared in Joy Bayless's book Rufus Wilmot Griswold: Poe's Literary Executor. By this time, the portraits were in the possession of Randolph Hartley's son, also named Randolph Wakeman Hartley (dates unknown).About twenty years later, the portraits appear in the background of a photograph of his son Benjamin Wakeman Hartley (1938–2015). In the picture, the paintings are hanging on the wall behind a Christmas tree. Over the course of several years, leaves from this and other trees and houseplants found their way onto the back of Griswold's portrait and became wedged into the space between the back of the canvas and the stretcher. So much debris eventually collected there that the lower edge of the painting developed a significant bulge. This damage is still visible at the lower edge of the canvas.Although the paintings were retouched and varnished at least one more time, they have never been cleaned. As a result, the particles of tobacco smoke and dust that adhered to the surface were simply covered with additional varnish and even a layer of linseed oil. Additionally, Caroline Griswold's portrait shows drip marks that seem to indicate the painting has survived a food fight. By the time they arrived at the Poe Museum in 2016, the paintings were almost completely obscured.Harold Gordon Antiques in Framingham, Massachusetts, acquired the Benjamin Wakeman Hartley estate by 2016. Gordon sold several documents pertaining to Griswold's second wife, Charlotte Myers of Charleston, to the College of Charleston while the American Antiquarian Society purchased the journals and letters of Griswold's missionary daughter Emily Griswold Hartley, but Gordon offered the rest of his Griswold items to the Poe Museum. With the approval of the Poe Museum's collection committee, the museum curator launched a crowdfunding campaign, which he promoted through the museum's popular social media platforms. Within weeks, thirty-seven donors from California to New York contributed to the fund. Among the major contributors were Poe Museum trustees Susan Jaffe Tane and Stephan Loewentheil.The items acquired by the Poe Museum include twenty-three letters written by Rufus Griswold, two of his poems, two letters from Elizabeth Ellet, two letters from Caroline Griswold, sixteen other letters addressed to Griswold or other family members, several related newspaper clippings, one photograph of a portrait of Griswold, and an engraving and profile of Griswold cut from the June 1845 issue of Graham's Magazine (with a letter from Griswold concerning having this portrait engraved). Many of the letters concern Caroline Griswold's death, and among these is the bill for her funeral. Other letters concern Griswold's finances, his dealings with the literary figures including Washington Irving and Horace Greeley, and his love of visual art. Multiple letters reference having various paintings framed, and two of the letters mention paintings he is having engraved for publication. While many of Griswold's letters are already public collections, the Poe Museum's collection stayed in Griswold's family because they dealt with private matters and, therefore, promise researchers valuable insights into Griswold's personality not often found in his business letters.The two Griswold poems in the collection are addressed to Elizabeth Waring, a woman with whom Griswold was briefly infatuated in the months after Caroline's death. Another poem, which is unsigned, is addressed by a married woman to a married man.One of the museum's interns has begun transcribing, cataloging, and scanning the letters, which will soon be housed in archival sleeves and folders for their protection. The museum's curator has shown the portraits of Rufus and Caroline Griswold to two different conservators. Each advised a different method for treating the works, and the collection committee will decide how to proceed. Until then, the portrait of Rufus Griswold is on display in the museum's Elizabeth Arnold Poe Memorial Building along with some of the letters and manuscripts Griswold's grandson Roger Griswold donated to the Poe Museum in the 1930s. Guests in the gallery have noticed that a small white square on the right side of Griswold's face has been cleaned to show the true colors the sitter would have seen when the painting was fresh from the artist's studio. Soon the entire painting will be stabilized and repaired so that it will look very much like it did in Griswold's time. A similar area on Caroline Griswold's portrait has also been cleaned to reveal the true colors of her lace and brooch.While the Poe Museum's collections committee immediately made a unanimous decision to purchase the Griswold collection, a few of the museum's members have expressed concerns that Poe might not appreciate having a portrait of his worst enemy displayed in his museum. It might actually be Griswold who would have objected to having his portrait hang next to a large marble and bronze monument to the man he despised. The truth is that the Poe Museum is dedicated to telling Poe's story, and it is impossible to separate the facts from the fictions surrounding Poe's biography without addressing the source of most of those myths. That is why the Poe Museum is the ideal institution to preserve and display this important portrait of Rufus Griswold and make these Griswold documents available to the public.