Fleur-de-lys Studios

The story

The Fleur-de-Lys Studios is a small but remarkable building on Thomas Street, a one-block lane at the foot of College Hill in Providence, Rhode Island. Its address is 7 Thomas Street, though at least one magazine gives 11. Across the street rises the 1774 First Baptist Meeting House, itself a National Historic Landmark, and the original Rhode Island School of Design building is just beyond. The studio went up in 1885, and its first artists moved in on January 1, 1886.

It was the joint creation of painter Sydney Richmond Burleigh and architect Edmund Russell Willson of the Providence firm Stone, Carpenter & Willson. Burleigh had trained in Paris from 1876 to 1880 under Jean-Paul Laurens and became a leading figure in Rhode Island art, sitting on the boards of RISD until his death in 1931. Willson had studied at Harvard and the École des Beaux-Arts. According to Burleigh's wife, Sarah, the design imitated the old half-timbered houses of Chester, England, where her husband had recently stayed; Willson also knew Chester and had sketched its medieval streets as a student.

The building was raised by local builders working with the Art Workers Guild, which Burleigh founded in 1885 with John G. Aldrich and Charles Walter Stetson and named after a London group set up the year before. It was the guild's first joint project, and historians count the Providence circle among the pioneers of the English craft-guild idea in America. That is why the Fleur-de-Lys matters: it is considered a key architectural monument of the American Arts and Crafts Movement, which favored handmade work and art woven into everyday life. In 1992 it became a National Historic Landmark, entering the National Register of Historic Places the same year, and it also belongs to the College Hill Historic District.

The studio has a literary afterlife too. H. P. Lovecraft lodged his fictional sculptor Henry Anthony Wilcox here in "The Call of Cthulhu," mocking the building as "a hideous Victorian imitation of seventeenth-century Breton architecture." In 1929 Bertrand K. Hart, literary editor of the Providence Journal, noticed that Wilcox's address was one where he himself had once lived. Pretending to be insulted, he promised in his column of November 30 to send a ghost to Lovecraft's house at 3 a.m. Lovecraft replied with a poem, "The Messenger," written at that hour, and Hart printed it on December 3. It was a joke between writers, not a haunting report.

The legend

The ghost actually associated with the building is Angela O'Leary, a Providence watercolorist who studied at RISD and was Burleigh's protégée. She kept a second-floor studio beside his, linked by a connecting door. Many tellers hint at a romance between the young artist and the married painter, but Michael Rose, gallery manager of the nearby Providence Art Club, says he has found no evidence of one.

Her death in 1921 is the root of the story, and the accounts differ in detail. She missed a club gathering one Friday, and the boy sent to check on her discovered that gas escaping from the light fittings had overpowered her. Rhode Island Monthly sets the scene in her own studio. Wikipedia instead puts her, unconscious, in Burleigh's studio two days before her death at Rhode Island Hospital on October 3, describing it as an attempted suicide; Rose says she struggled with depression. Readers should keep in mind that the exact circumstances are not settled.

Former resident artists say her spirit walks the building's halls, according to Rory Raven's Haunted Providence (2008), the earliest printed ghost source found; the tale is retold in Rhode Island Legends (2012). She is also linked to the Providence Art Club, just down the street. There, staff say her large portrait seems to follow visitors with its eyes, and the painter Maxwell Mays, who later worked in Burleigh's old studio at the club, liked to tell guests he had seen her apparition, as the Providence Journal recounted in 2024. The Art Club has also made a video about her.

Not everyone has met her. The painter who rents the studio today told Rhode Island Monthly he has never seen the ghost, though he admits the building feels unsettling after dark. Our sources mention no paranormal investigation or TV episode, so the story rests on artists' anecdotes and local ghost books.

What remains today

The building looks almost exactly as it did in its 1885 plans and the photographs taken when it opened, apart from extra studio space carved out of the attic. Built of wood, it rises two and a half stories, about thirty feet wide and forty-three feet tall at the ridge, with a half-timbered front filled with decorative stucco. Look for the folding-screen effect of the angled oriel windows, leaded casements, the name "BURLEIGH" and "THE FLEUR-DE-LYS STUDIOS" in the porch panels, a fleur-de-lis and the date 1885 over the door, a panel of irises with a line of verse, and three allegorical figures of Sculpture, Painting and Architecture flanked by portraits of Burleigh in a tam-o'-shanter and his wife in a ruff. Inside, the large north-lit studios survive, and the first-floor fireplace is faced with antique tiles salvaged from a Dordrecht inn in Holland. It is still used as artists' studios.

Visiting

The Fleur-de-Lys Studios is private, rented artists' space, not a museum. Enjoy its extraordinary facade from Thomas Street and do not enter without an invitation; the tenant is said to welcome visitors on occasion, so ask rather than knock unannounced. The Providence Art Club galleries nearby are free and open to the public, and the club is home to Angela O'Leary's large portrait. A 2023 article described a nightly Providence ghost tour by US Ghost Adventures that stops outside the studio; check whether it still runs. Combine it with a walk around College Hill and the First Baptist Meeting House.

Sources

1. National Register nomination #92001886 (texte intégral) — U.S. National Park Service · Public record
2. National Register of Historic Places file (NRHP #92001886) — U.S. National Park Service · Public domain (U.S. government)
3. Wikimedia Commons category : Fleur-de-lys Studios — Wikimedia Commons
4. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Providence, RI 1958 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1958 · Public domain (USGS)
5. USGS 1:62500-scale Quadrangle for Providence, MA 1887 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1887 · Public domain (USGS)
6. "16 Real-Life Haunted Places in Rhode Island" ("The Forlorn Artist at the Fleur De Lys") (Kaitlyn Murray, Oct 2024) — Rhode Island Monthly — Rhode Island Monthly
7. "Angela O'Leary" — Wikipedia — McGreen 2012, Providence Journal 31 Oct 2024
8. "New Ghost Tour Highlights the Supernatural Side of Providence" (Kaitlyn Murray, 27 Feb 2023) — Rhode Island Monthly — Rhode Island Monthly
9. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.