American Art to 1950

Ivan Le Lorraine Albright occupies a unique place in the history of American art. From an artistic family, he at first resisted becoming an artist before realizing that he had both talent for and interest in painting. His paintings, which are usually classified as “magic realist,” frequently depict weighty and macabre themes, including death, aging, and the inevitable decline and decay of the body, which he regarded as a prison for the soul. He worked meticulously and over a period of months or even years, building elaborate sets to stage his haunting compositions. His titles—long and poetic—usually emerged after the paintings were finished, once he truly understood what they were about.

This lithograph was commissioned by Associated American Artists, a gallery which catered to a middle-class audience largely by selling prints made by famous painters. It is based on a similar painting entitled I Walk To and Fro through Civilization and I Talk as I Walk (Follow Me, the Monk) (1926-7, Art Institute of Chicago). It depicts Brother Peter Haberlin, an octogenarian Franciscan friar who was regarded as the last link between the old California missionaries and the modern friars. In the print—as in the painting—the influence of Old Masters, in particular El Greco and Francisco de Zurbarán, is evident in the monk’s flowing, voluminous robes and the flickering quality of the light. Though light streams in through an open window, the monk’s body also glows with an inner light, emphasizing his simple holiness.

Francis Alexander was twenty-five when he painted Mary Ann Duff. At the peak of her career, Duff was considered as fine a tragic actress as the earlier renowned English actress Sarah Siddons (immortalized as the "Tragic Muse" by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1783). Though born in England and first appearing on stage as a dancer in Ireland, Duff was thirty and living in New York when this painting was completed. Largely forgotten now, it has been argued that Duff should rightly be considered the first First Lady of the American Stage, having received her theatrical training solely in America. This painting predates Alexander's travels in Europe, where he would study the great monuments of art and refine his technique.

Though produced early in his career in an almost naïf style, Alexander’s likeness captures the vivacious nature of the actress as she looks out of the canvas with sparkling eyes and rosy cheeks. Great care has been taken in rendering the texture and patterning of the drapery that covers her chair and falls over and around her arm. Mary Ann Duff would have been conscious of her rising status on the American stage. A portrait such as this might have been commissioned in a self-conscious attempt at mimicking the habits of respectable American society. Remembering that actors in the nineteenth century were not accorded the high social status in America that they enjoy today, Miss Duff would have been eager to present herself as a reputable lady of society. Her apparel raises more questions than it answers. She appears to be wearing a scholar's cap, and the high, starched, lace collar is not in keeping with contemporaneous fashions. It is possible that she has chosen to be portrayed in the costume of a favorite character. Unfortunately, there is little in the way of records for this important personage of American theatrical history.

This portrait of Annie Russell, after whom Rollins’ theater is named, dates from early in both her career and in that of the painter, John White Alexander. Alexander, an orphan from Pittsburgh, got his start as an illustrator for Harper’s and other magazines in New York. Like many artists of his generation, Alexander studied in Europe, spending time in Munich and Polling, in Bavaria, as well as Venice. While in Venice he met fellow American James Whistler, who was there to create etchings of the city’s famous architecture and canals. Whistler, one of the foremost proponents of the idea of “art for art’s sake,” would have a profound influence on Alexander, who returned to New York in 1881 and almost immediately established himself as one of the city’s premier portrait painters.

Soon after he executed this work Alexander became well known for his purely aesthetic depictions of women, and this painting is one of his last commissioned portraits. Russell, who is depicted with her back mostly turned to the viewer, is an excellent early example of this tendency in his work. Her long, lean form is contrasted with the smooth roundedness of the vase, and the pink blooms of the flowers seem to reach around her, drawing her in as another of the aesthetic objects in the room. Her costume—from a light fairy comedy by W.S. Gilbert—enhances the effect by taking her out of everyday time and space and into a realm of purest fantasy. Alexander painted at least one other portrait of Russell, and she owned this one throughout her long life.

Born in Washington, D.C., John Taylor Arms studied architecture at Princeton University, working as an architect in New York City before serving in World War I. After the war he gave up architecture in favor of etching, which he had been practicing as a hobby—his wife, Dorothy, gave him his first etching kit as a Christmas gift. A deeply religious man, Arms was particularly attracted to the Gothic ecclesiastical architecture of Europe, embarking on frequent trips with Dorothy to visit churches and cathedrals in France, Spain, Italy, and England. He typically spent several hours to several days making drawings of each site, which he then translated to etching plates at his home studio. 

This print is typical of Arms’s early work, in which he sought to create picturesque views of the vernacular architecture and daily life that had grown up around the churches and cathedrals he depicted. He enjoyed the contrast in uses, scales, and eras that such a framing produced, feeling that it highlighted the enduring power and grandeur of the Gothic buildings. Here the cathedral in Amiens, in Northwest France—built from 1220-1270—towers over the surrounding city, its grandeur highlighted by the almost wispy faintness of the lines Arms uses to depict it. Two peasants are engrossed in conversation in the foreground, suggesting that this exquisite structure is part of everyday life, a fact which Arms found immensely appealing.

This etching, which depicts the Church of Santa Maria Major in Ronda, Spain, indicates the evolution of Arms’s work after 1927-28. Abandoning the picturesque views incorporating local scenery that had characterized his early work, Arms began instead to depict churches and cathedrals as standalone structures. He believed this allowed the buildings to better stand on their own, reflecting their full majesty and importance. The church, officially dedicated by Ferdinand and Isabella after the culmination of the Reconquista, incorporates Islamic elements, particularly in the minaret tower (leftover from the local mosque) which Arms highlights in this print. The vertical format of the piece emphasizes the tower’s sharp verticality, while the use of negative space effectively evokes the white stucco walls of the relatively unassuming exterior. The sharp, crisp linearity of the scene also evokes the sunny environs of Andalusia, the Southern Spanish province in which Ronda and its church are located.

D.F. Barry is best known for his portraits of Native American chiefs, warriors, scouts, and women. Often called the “shadow catcher,” Barry captured iconic images of life in the American West. To contemporary viewers from the eastern United States and Europe, his images portrayed a new world they had never seen, allowing his cabinet card photographs to sell in large numbers and quickly. Chief Rain in the Face, the leader of the Lakota Tribe, fought alongside Chief Sitting Bull to defeat Colonel George Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn. Chief Rain in the Face is photographed in his eagle-feather headdress holding a stone-head club and peace pipe. D.F. Barry’s photos have become iconic symbols of important figures and of what life was like in the Western Frontier. Through his images he has been able to give a glimpse into past moments in time.

The American painter, printmaker, and illustrator George Bellows is best known for his depictions of semi-legal boxing matches and New York City street scenes. Though slightly younger than most of its members, these subjects—as well as his commitment to leftist politics—made him a natural fit with the Ashcan School, the group of painters loosely associated with artist and teacher Robert Henri who depicted everyday life in American cities during the first decades of the twentieth century. Bellows—who died at the age of only 42 after a ruptured appendix—was an innovator in fine art lithography. He worked with master lithographer Bolton Brown to develop a wide range of custom lithographic crayons, which allowed him to achieve much more nuanced atmospheric effects than had previously been achieved in lithography.

This print depicts an evening at Petipas, a popular French restaurant at which the Ashcan artists frequently gathered. The white-bearded standing figure is Irish portrait painter John Butler Yeats (father of poet William Butler Yeats). He speaks with mustachioed Robert Henri, while the balding Bellows leans in behind them. The seated, stylishly dressed woman is Bellows’s wife Emma. She gazes confidently out at the viewer, drawing them into the warm, collegial scene. It is striking that Bellows included her front and center in this view of his intellectual and artistic world, indicating her centrality to his creative process.

Born in Salem, Massachusetts, Frank Weston Benson spent the majority of his life in and around Boston. He studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and—along with his classmate Edmund Tarbell—was a long-tenured and popular teacher and administrator at the school. Along with fellow painters including Tarbell, John Henry Twachtman, and Childe Hassam, Benson was a founding member of The Ten, a group of American painters—many of whom were influenced by French Impressionism—who rebelled against the conservatism of the American art establishment of the late nineteenth century. Despite this antiestablishment affiliation—or perhaps because of it—Benson remained a beloved teacher at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts until his retirement in 1913.  

Though Benson is best remembered as an artist of sporting scenes, he was also an accomplished and widely respected landscape painter. This painting was made at Wooster Farm, his family’s property on North Haven Island, the same location where he created many of his most iconic sporting pictures. It depicts a pond Benson had dug for his wife, Ellen, who planted it with waterlilies. In 1921, shortly before completing this work, Benson—who was in search of a new way to depict outdoor scenes—had begun experimenting with watercolors, becoming quite prolific in the medium. His experimentation also impacted his oil paintings, as he developed a looser and more aqueous application of paint. That influence is evident here in the free, even smeary quality of the paint. His adoption of the waterlily, one of the most quintessentially Impressionist subjects, shows his continuing engagement with the style, which he had adopted seriously after joining the Ten American Painters in 1898.  

Born in Salem, Massachusetts, Frank Weston Benson spent the majority of his life in and around Boston. He studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and—along with his classmate Edmund Tarbell—was a long-tenured and popular teacher and administrator at the school. Along with fellow painters including Tarbell, John Henry Twachtman, and Childe Hassam, Benson was a founding member of The Ten, a group of American painters—many of whom were influenced by French Impressionism—who rebelled against the conservatism of the American art establishment of the late nineteenth century.

Benson was best known as a painter, but he was also an accomplished and prolific etcher, picking up the medium only in 1912, long after he had made his name as a painter. This image, depicts a working man moving a recently harvested log downriver for processing. Benson frequently traveled along the coast and in the interior of Maine, where he likely made the drawing that inspired this image. Its spare use of line and correspondingly large amounts of negative space reflect the influence of James Whistler, while the workaday subject and fresh, almost sketchy immediacy are reminiscent of Impressionism.

Benson was an avid sportsman who was first inspired to paint at the age of sixteen after shooting a snipe and a rail in the salt marshes near his Essex County, Massachusetts home. Early in his career, he used the prize money from an exhibition to finance the purchase—along with two of his brothers-in-law—of a small hunting cabin in Eastham, on Cape Cod. Later, he would frequently travel to the island of North Haven in Maine’s Penobscot Bay, where he found the inspiration for most of his outdoor scenes. It was at his farmstead there that he took up etching in 1912—he had experimented with it in his student days but left it behind as he established his career as a painter. This inaugurated a remarkable second career as perhaps America’s foremost producer of bird prints, helping to establish it as a standalone genre.

Though he had been inspired by the ornithological illustrations of John James Audubon early in his life—aspiring to a career as an illustrator as a teenager—Benson’s etchings are very different from Audubon’s highly detailed and rigidly posed illustrations. Befitting his interest in Impressionism, Benson prefers to represent his birds in motion, especially in flight. Rather than aiming for anatomical precision, he emphasizes the evanescent qualities of light and air, as well as the light liveliness of the birds themselves. As in Log Driver, Benson demonstrates in this and his other wildlife prints a mastery of negative space, using expanses of white to represent the calm placidity of the New England water, which stands in marked contrast to the bold dynamism of the geese.

Thomas Hart Benton, along with John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood, was a foremost artist of the Regionalist movement in the United States. Championing a figurative style indebted to earlier twentieth century modernism and the public art of the Mexican muralist movement, Benton was a loud, even combative, voice for the depiction of distinctively American subjects in a distinctively American style. A longtime resident of New York, he famously left it in 1935 to return to his native Missouri, where he had been commissioned to paint A Social History of Missouri, a series of murals in the state capitol in Jefferson City. Benton taught at the Kansas City Art Institute from 1935 to 1941, when he was fired for criticizing the closely affiliated Nelson-Atkins Art Museum.

This print is based on a painting of the same name (1941, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts) which was made as a classroom demonstration during his last year as a teacher. It depicts Ben Nichols, an eighty-two-year-old former slave who Benton has transformed into the Biblical figure Aaron, older brother of Moses. Aaron’s lined face and downcast eyes transmit a solemn dignity, while the busy mustache and crinkle of the mouth convey the sitter’s individual personality. This print was issued in edition of 250 by the Associated American Artists, a company which sold fine art prints by noted American artists for the low price of five dollars, thereby greatly expanding the audiences of artists like Benton, who was an early champion of the company.

Born in Russia, Eugene Berman fled the Russian Revolution with his brother Leonid (also a painter), emigrating to Paris in 1918. There he formed the core of the Neo-Romantic movement along with fellow Russian Pavel Tchelitchev and Frenchman Christian Bérard. Berman gained particular renown as a set designer for ballets and operas, where he was known for taking liberties with historical settings in favor of his preferred aesthetic, which emphasized the stark grandeur and mysterious light of ancient ruins, as well as a preoccupation with the macabre. He moved to New York in 1935, becoming one of the most important designers for the opera and theater there, including doing work for the New Ballets Russes under Colonel Wassily de Basil and the Metropolitan Opera under Rudolf Bing.

This watercolor and ink drawing is a conceptual sketch for a proposed staging of Felix Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4 in A major, commonly called the Italian, which was to be produced by de Basil and choreographed by the dancer and choreographer David Lichine. The ballet was never staged, but the drawing remains as a fine example of Berman’s creative process, demonstrating how he would have translated the symphony. The blotchy smears of the watercolor help to unify the grand proscenium of the stage with the set design, which includes a tilting, ruined flag and moldering ruins. The symphony itself is considerably more lively than Berman’s rendering suggests, indicating the influence his Neo-Romantic sensibilities had on his set designs.

Albert Bierstadt, who is best known for his monumental depictions of American scenery, was, like many artists of his generation, trained abroad. When he arrived in Düsseldorf, Germany in 1853 to study at the famed Kunstakademie there, his fellow Americans Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze were so unimpressed with his talent that they doubted he would make it as an artist. Undeterred, Bierstadt disappeared for a summer of sketching along the Rhine River and in the Hartz Mountains. Upon his return to Düsseldorf, Bierstadt’s improvement was apparently so marked that Whittredge, Leutze, and several other artists were compelled to send a letter to a newspaper in Bierstadt’s hometown of New Bedford, MA, swearing that the works the painter was sending back were his own, and not those of Andreas Achenbach or another German artist.

After a few years in Düsseldorf and traveling throughout Europe, in particular the Alps, Bierstadt returned to the United States with a plan. Securing a position on the surveying expedition commanded by Colonel Frederick W. Lander, Bierstadt turned the fine eye for detail he had honed in Germany on the scenery of Nebraska and Wyoming. He sent a voluminous correspondence detailing his adventures to eager readers back East, ensuring that there would be a strong market for his work upon his return. Though he is best known for his highly finished large-scale compositions, this and similar sketches reveal his sensitivity to effects of light and atmosphere, and his ability to capture people and animals, as well as forbidding mountain peaks. Bierstadt used sketches like these, photographs, and American Indian artifacts and other materials he gathered on this and subsequent expeditions—all of which he kept and displayed in his studio in the famed Tenth Street Studio Building—as part of a very successful marketing strategy that resulted in his becoming the wealthiest artist in the United States by the late 1860s.

The son of a successful physician, Ralph Albert Blakelock was originally supposed to follow his father into medicine. After a few semesters of medical college, however, he felt the stronger pull of an artistic career and dropped out. Largely self-taught, he quickly mastered the basics of Hudson River School landscape. From the beginning, however, he felt a lack of affinity with the sunny, optimistic style, preferring to paint in a more personal, romantic manner. Early in his career this placed him outside the artistic mainstream, and he struggled to support his large family on the sales of his paintings. This struggle was exacerbated by his battles with mental health, as he increasingly began to suffer from both depression and delusions of grandeur, eventually landing him in a psychiatric hospital in 1899; he spent most of the final twenty years of his life institutionalized.  

Though his mental health struggles—as well as his many paintings of dark and mysterious moonlit scenes—have often led to Blakelock’s being termed an outsider or visionary, he actually was closely integrated into the New York art scene of his day and kept current with artistic trends both in the United States and abroad. His painting was heavily influenced by the French Barbizon school, from which he gained an appreciation for romantic subjectivity and the loose handling of paint. Rising Moon is an example of his most well-known style of painting, in which entirely imagined landscapes—rather than real places—are presided over by large, luminous moons. The painting reverses the usual landscape elements, with inky dark foreground trees and other elements giving way to more luminous water and sky in the background. As Blakelock languished in mental hospitals, often struggling to gain access to basic painting supplies, appreciation for his unique vision grew in the wider world.  A painting similar to this one sold for $20,000 in 1916, a record for a living American painter at the time.   

Growing up in Cincinnati, Robert Frederick Blum was heavily influenced by the work of Spanish painter Mariano Fortuny, which he saw in local collections. He adopted the older painter’s use of a rapid, sketchy line to quickly delineate the forms of his sitters’ faces, relying on variations in line weight and tone to suggest contours. In his late teens Blum moved to Philadelphia to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts before moving on to New York, where he established himself as a professional illustrator and fine artist. Always a slow worker in oils, Blum preferred the sketchy immediacy of drawing and etching, a medium he picked up after meeting James Whistler—the acknowledged master of the medium—in Venice.

From Whistler he also picked up another technique, the “Japanese method” of drawing. Taken from Whistler’s study of Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, it involved starting from the point he expected to be the exact center of focus in the work and proceeding outward, a process which in this case results in the model’s prominent nose and striking eyes dominating the composition. Little is known about De Stephano, who appears to have been Blum’s lifelong friend and sometime companion. Though Blum never married, she claimed to be his widow after his premature death in 1903. She served as his model for a number of aesthetic portraits, as well as the murals Moods to Music and The Vintage Festival, originally executed for New York’s Mendelssohn Hall and now at the Brooklyn Museum.

Ilya Bolotowsky stood at the forefront of abstraction in the United States during a time when many in the American art world were reluctant to embrace non-objective art. After immigrating to the United States as a teenager Bolotowsky studied at the conservative National Academy of Design and worked as a textile designer. After a trip to study art in Europe he happened to encounter the work of Piet Mondrian and Joan Miró, and his early work attempted to blend Mondrian’s geometric style with Miró’s biomorphic abstractions. In 1936 he became a co-founder and president of American Abstract Artists, a group of painters and sculptors who were frustrated by their exclusion from the major modern art venues in New York, including the Museum of Modern art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

In 1945, after serving in the military during World War II, Bolotowsky refocused his artistic attention on Mondrian, who had spent the last years of his life in New York, where he had been hugely influential on the art world there. This work reflects the influence of the gridded, non-spatial canvases of Mondrian’s Neoplasticism, though in this piece Bolotowsky retains non-primary colors and diagonal lines, elements which Mondrian had abandoned later in his career. This work was made while Bolotowsky was serving as a replacement for Josef Albers, who was on sabbatical from Black Mountain College. For the remaining decades of his life Bolotowsky would be a well-regarded art teacher at a series of colleges and a strenuous advocate for geometric abstraction.

Henry Botkin was born in Boston, Massachusetts, attending various art schools there from 1913 to 1917. In 1917 he moved to New York, where he studied at the Art Students’ League. While studying he lived with his famous cousins, the composer George Gershwin and his lyricist brother Ira. In 1926 Botkin moved to Paris, where he continued to study art while also acting as Gershwin’s art agent, sending the composer (an enthusiastic collector) photos and prices of paintings he might like to acquire. Gershwin liked the works of the Fauves and other slightly earlier Modernist painters, commenting in letters to his cousin on their use of color and form. When Botkin returned to New York in 1933 he taught Gershwin to paint and draw, and also accompanied him on the 1934 trip to Folly Island, South Carolina which would result in Porgy and Bess, perhaps Gershwin’s most famous work. As Gershwin was writing his jazz opera Botkin was at work on a series of paintings depicting similar people and themes.

This painting, executed in the middle of Botkin’s long life, shows both the artist’s engagement with the figurative painting traditions of the first half of the twentieth century and the influence of his musician cousins. The titular trumpeter, rendered in a series of Cubist-derived flat planes, sits contemplatively on a broad low stool, while the musical notes of his profession float in the flattened space around him. The generally cool, bluish cast of the figure stands in stark contrast to the reds and oranges of the surrounding space, suggesting both the intellectual and sensuous aspects of musical performance.

Margaret Bourke-White first travelled to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1930, the first of three consecutive summers when she documented the first Soviet five-year plan for American audiences, the first Western photographer to do so. Bourke-White made her fame in the 1920s as an industrial photographer, pioneering a technique to capture the stark beauty of the Otis Steel Company in Cleveland, among other icons of American heavy industry. That resulted in her being hired by Henry Luce to work at Fortune magazine, which sent her on the assignment to the USSR.

During her first trip, Bourke-White focused on the heavy machinery in mines and factories, but found herself increasingly interested in the people she met on her journey, finding herself charmed by their solid resilience. This photo depicts students in a small village school outside the city of Kolomna, southeast of Moscow, reflecting that interest in the Russian people. Bourke-White has arranged her thirteen sitters in a rough pyramid that emphasizes their solidity, as do the rough-hewn but sturdy pews and walls of their surroundings. Bourke-White’s increasing empathy for the Soviet people prompted a similar identification with working-class people in the United States, and her Popular Front sympathies earned her the attention of J. Edgard Hoover and the House Un-American Activities Committee.

During a return trip to the Soviet Union Bourke-White rode through the Caucuses on horseback, accompanied by seven Soviet commissars, often sleeping in caves and eating sheep that local villagers had roasted whole. Hearing that Josef Stalin’s birthplace was nearby she went to photograph it, finding the leader’s earthen-floored house and a great-aunt. She then went to Tiflis, the Georgian capital, and photographed Stalin’s mother, who she reported did not fully understand her son’s job, and would have preferred he had joined the priesthood. The close-cropped portrait emphasizes the woman’s traditional dress and severe expression, as well as her eyes, which are enlarged by the effect of her eyeglasses.

In her 1931 book Eyes on Russia and subsequent articles for the New York Times Magazine, Bourke-White wrote of her experiences traveling on overwhelmed Soviet trains to visit factories and other industrial sites, often subsisting on little more than cold canned beans she had brought with her from Germany. She also wrote a great deal about Soviet women, on whose labor the five-year plan relied just as much as that of men. Attempting to reconcile this with American notions of feminine comportment, she commented that the Russian woman, “In her longing for fashionable clothes, for adornment, for attention…is wholly feminine.,” while, at the same time “…working, as the men work, to advance the great industrial program of which she feels she is part. She is never conscious of a conflict between her career and her personal life.”

Margaret Bourke-White’s modern aesthetic and attention to the concerns of the machine age inspired Henry Luce to hire her as a photographer at Fortune magazine. While on assignment for the magazine, she made three trips to the USSR. In 1930, she visited eastern Ukraine and southern Russia
and photographed the construction of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station (DniproHES), the Stalingrad Tractor Factory, and the Novorossiysk Cement Plant, and in 1931 she traveled to Chelyabinsk Oblast to cover workers building the largest steel mill in the world, the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works (MMK). In the summer of 1932, she returned to the USSR, traveling from the Caucasus to Baku and back
to Ukraine, where she found herself increasingly interested in the strength and character of the Soviet people. Soviet Serenade (1931) captures a street performer smiling as he plays his accordion and looks down upon the viewer.

Mathew Brady was already the most famous photographer in America by 1860, when his studio took its first image of Abraham Lincoln, commemorating the Republican presidential candidate’s February 27, 1860 speech at Cooper Union in New York City. Lincoln credited that image—reproduced on the cover of the printed speech as well as disseminated widely as a carte de visite—with helping him earn the nomination and eventually the presidency. It also began a long-running collaboration between America’s foremost photographer and its most famous politician, with Lincoln posing for photographs at Brady’s studio throughout the Civil War. Lincoln’s images on both the five-dollar bill and penny are based on such photographs, as are most of the familiar images of the sixteenth president. 

The carte de visite format was revolutionary, for it allowed an unlimited number of inexpensive paper prints to be made from one glass-plate negative, permitting the photograph to be distributed widely, in contrast to the daguerreotype and ambrotype, earlier formats in which only a single image was made. Americans of all walks of life amassed large collections of images of famous people, making this the first time in history when the faces of the country’s leaders were widely known. This image was captured by Thomas Le Mere, a photographer who worked at Brady’s Washington, D.C. studio. This captures an important aspect of Brady’s work, which is the fact that he rarely took or developed the images himself, though he usually posed particularly important clients. This was standard practice at the time, in contrast with the twentieth century, when photographers came to be seen as individual artists who controlled the entire process. During the war Brady’s photographers spread out to follow the Union Army on its campaigns, bringing Americans some of the first photographic images of war and inaugurating a tradition of photojournalism that survives to this day.

Born near Honesdale, in rural northeastern Pennsylvania, Jennie Brownscombe belonged to the first generation of American women artists for whom professional training was routine, if still often segregated from men. After a stint as a schoolteacher in her late teens she moved to New York, where she enrolled at The Cooper Union, graduating in 1871. She then studied at the National Academy of Design, becoming a founding member of the Art Students League in 1875. She first attracted notice in 1876, exhibiting her work in the Women’s Pavilion at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Throughout the remainder of her long life she maintained a successful career as a portraitist and painter of genre scenes, both historical and contemporary. Many of her works were reproduced as prints or etchings by companies targeting the middle-class market, while others served as illustrations for magazines and calendars. She became especially well-known for her depictions of the domestic life of George and Martha Washington, painting a number of scenes of social events at Mount Vernon.

This painting, which was published as an etching by New Jersey printmaker James S. King, exemplifies Brownscombe’s mature style, which combines her academic training with the naturalism favored by painters on both sides of the Atlantic, including the American Winslow Homer and the Frenchman Jean-François Millet. The picture depicts a scene from Brownscombe’s time, as indicated by the nineteenth century hairstyles (particularly the men’s facial hair), but draws upon Brownscombe interest in and careful study of Rococo and other historical architecture in France, Germany, and Italy. The depiction of the choir boys—sweetly orderly but also individualized—shows Brownscombe’s attention to popular sentimental taste.

German-born American photographer Henry Buehman emigrated to the United States in 1868 with three years of photography experience. He worked as an itinerant photographer in places like California, Nevada, and Utah before settling in Tucson, Arizona, where he established his own photography studio. Buehman’s trips around surrounding Arizona territory allowed him to add scenic images and portraits of Native Americans to his portfolio. Although the identity of the woman in this image is unknown, her facial tattoos suggest she is possibly part of the Apache tribe. She is pictured wearing a beaded necklace; the white lines and circles in her vertical chin tattoos are painted in by the photographer. Bushman's portraits allow viewers to have a glance of the Western United States and Native American culture during a period much different from current times.

James Edward Buttersworth was born in London, where he was trained by his father Thomas, himself a successful painter of maritime scenes. Buttersworth emigrated to the United States sometime between by 1847, after a successful early career in England. Settling in Lower Manhattan, followed by Hoboken, New Jersey, Buttersworth quickly established himself as one of the foremost marine painters in the country. The 1850s were a particularly auspicious time for American marine painting, due to recent advances in maritime technology. The clipper ships—invented for the tea trade with China—became even more important after the discovery of gold in California, setting off a race to build the fastest possible ship. Similarly, American success in sailing races set off a mania for yachting. The owners of these vessels and the public alike clamored for accurate depictions of them, and Buttersworth tapped into this burgeoning market.

Buttersworth became one of the country’s foremost painters of daring maritime scenes, known for his ability to accurately represent details of rigging and other aspects of shipboard architecture—a skill which was highly prized by collectors—combined with the drama and adventure of the high seas. In this scene, which takes place just off the Rock of Gibraltar at the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea. In the background, British ships at anchor are tossed by the storm, which all but blots out the light of day. The foreground ship, identifiable as a clipper by its raked-back elegance and prominent bow, desperately attempts to furl sail in the face of the onslaught. Capturing the moment of highest drama, Buttersworth punctuates the danger with jagged stripes of lightning that jut out into the inky blackness.

Born in Denmark, Emil Carlsen immigrated to Chicago in 1872, where he trained under a fellow Danish painter named Lauritz Holst. When Holst returned to Denmark, Carlsen inherited his studio, also becoming an instructor at the Chicago Academy of Design. In 1875 Carlsen traveled to Paris, where he became interested in the soft, delicate realism of the French still-life painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. He moved to New York in 1879. Struggling to make ends meet as a painter, he lived a semi-peripatetic existence that saw him move to Philadelphia; back to Europe; to San Francisco; and finally back to New York by 1891. In 1896, at the age of 50, he married, moving with his wife into his studio on 59th street. After this, both his personal and professional lives became much more settled, and he embarked on a career as a teacher at the National Academy of Design, Art Students League, and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.  

During this time Carlsen also became friends with John Henry Twachtman, Julian Alden Weir, and other painters affiliated with the Tonalist movement in landscape painting. Twachtman, Weir, and the Tonalists inaugurated a quieter and more intimate mode of landscape painting, in contrast to the bombast that characterized the Hudson River School of earlier generations. Carlsen’s interest in quietly intimate still-life painting meshed well with the Tonalist aesthetic. This painting is a prime example of this style, the popularity of which finally ensured Carlsen’s financial stability. He represents the copper urn and humble onions with a graceful sensitivity, emphasizing the effects of light and texture over strict illusionism.  

Over his long and productive career Jean Charlot had a profound influence on printmaking and mural painting in both Mexico and the United States. He was born in Paris and in 1921 moved to Mexico City after the death of his father—his mother was of mixed French and Aztec ancestry, a fact in which the family took great pride. He arrived at an auspicious time in Mexican history, as the period of unrest and social change surrounding the Mexican Revolution was beginning to wind down. When he arrived, he joined a ferment of artistic and cultural experimentation—known as Mexican modernism—that was answering the urgent question of what it meant to be Mexican. Charlot, who brought with him printmaking knowledge and equipment, as well as examples of modernist prints from France, is often credited with helping to inspire a revolution in printmaking in Mexico.

Charlot joined SOPTE (Sindicato de los Obreros Técnicos, Pintores y Excultores), an artist’s union, and signed on to their 1922 “Declaration of Social, Political, and Aesthetic Principles,” written by David Alfaro Siqueiros, whose large fresco murals are icons of Mexican Modernism. In the Declaration, the artists condemned easel painting as overly aristocratic and intellectual, preferring instead the more direct and accessible mediums of murals and printmaking. Charlot also joined the movement of artists and intellectuals known as Stridentism. Influced by Italian Futurism, Spanish Ultraism, and Dada, Stridentism celebrated modern technology and artistic forms, rejecting the staid classicism of traditional European art. Unlike the Futurists, however, the Stridentists rejected war and fascism, maintaining their socialist political commitments. 

Charlot moved to New York in 1929, spending time there with George C. Miller, the best fine art lithographer in the United States, to whom he was introduced by José Clemente Orozco, another of his colleagues in the Mexican modernist movement. In 1949 he went to Honolulu to do a mural commission for the University of Hawai’i. He so enjoyed his time there that he stayed until his death in 1979, executing many of his prints by correspondence with Lynton R. Kistler, a master lithographer based in Los Angeles.

Charlot left Mexico City for New York in 1929, making this print shortly after he arrived. It demonstrates both his approach to Mexican subjects and his continued formal and technical experimentation. Like many of his prints, it is based on careful observation of his subjects, in this case Mayan hunters in the Yucatán. Charlot wrote in his diary of watching the men leave to hunt at night, wearing lanterns on their heads to attract the leopards. His enthusiasm for Mexican culture led him to learn Nahuatl, the Aztec language, and he sought always to approach his subjects from a position of respect. The figure of the man, his back bent under the weight of the leopard, is represented with the solid monumentality he and other artists brought to Mexican modernism. The hunter’s smooth, rounded forms contrast sharply with the angular machinery of the gun. The darkness of the night sky, represented with swirling forms as well as sharper lines, shows Charlot’s interest in expanding the possibilities of lithography, a medium that traditionally was known for its clean lines and commercial uses.

William Merritt Chase was renowned during his time for his depictions of the American landscape as well as for his depictions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’s confident and stylish “new women.” He was perhaps most famous, however, for his still-life paintings, in particular his depictions of freshly caught cod and other North American fish. Shimmering with iridescent scales and still glistening from the sea, these fish were the perfect vehicles for Chase to showcase his masterful brushwork and rapid application of paint—he often did them as demonstration pieces in front of adoring audiences. 

The fish pictures date from Chase’s mature period around the turn of the twentieth century. This one, on the other hand, dates from just before the pivotal year of 1872, when he began a six-year stint studying in Munich. After a couple years in New York, where he studied at the National Academy of Design, Chase was living in St. Louis, where he established a local reputation for his still lifes. This painting shows his early mastery of the American still-life tradition. Set in a nondescript domestic interior, the picture includes a variety of succulent fruits, as well as a glass of wine—likely Madeira, a fortified dessert wine popular in the nineteenth century—and a piece of steak or other meat, a curious addition for a painting entitled Autumn Fruit. The American still-life as formulated by Raphaelle Peale, Severin Roesen, and other earlier painters prioritized pyramidal compositions and dark backgrounds, lending the produce an air of powerful beauty. Insect-chewed leaves and spots such as those on the peaches both heighten the naturalism of the depiction and hint at the food’s perishability, reminding the viewer of the fleeting nature of material abundance. Chase has given the fruit—particularly the grapes—a highly reflective shine, a practice designed to show his mastery of optical effects. Though Chase would develop a looser style during and after his stay in Munich, this painting shows his strong grasp of the textural and optical qualities of oil paint. 

William Merritt Chase was one of the most influential artists of the turn of the twentieth century, both as a painter—he helped introduce the artistic styles of Munich and Paris to the United States—and as a teacher and patron of the arts. From his return to the United States from Munich in 1878 Chase worked as a teacher, first at the Art Students’ League and later at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, as well as in a variety of summer schools, including the famed Shinnecock School on Long Island. A key aspect of his teaching was the live demonstration, in which he executed a landscape, still-life, or portrait study while his students watched, commenting all the while on his process. These performances were showcases for his bravura painting style, which emphasized loose, painterly brush strokes and largely eschewed preparatory drawing. When he was finished with the painting he would usually give it away, either bequeathing it to the school, giving it to the student who had served as model, or raffling it off.

This painting depicts a “Miss Covert,” and is the result of one of Chase’s in-class demonstrations. The young woman’s loose dress, fashionable high collar and straightforward gaze—which unflinchingly returns the viewer’s glance—marks her as a New Woman, a frequent Chase subject. New Women rejected many of the buttoned-up gender roles of the nineteenth century, taking on traditionally masculine roles, including that of artist. Chase was an early champion of female art students, remarking that genius knew no sex. At the same time, the flowers she holds serve to soften and feminize her, as well as emphasize the pink rosiness of her complexion.

This print is a reproduction of Chase’s early masterpiece Keying Up-the Court Jester (1875, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts), which he painted in 1875 while he was studying in Munich. Depicting a local artists’ model as a merry clown, the painting was intended to help Chase achieve notice back home in the United States. At this it was very successful, receiving rave reviews at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, as well as several other important exhibitions, including the National Academy of Design. It was a showcase for Chase’s bold new style, which merged the “brown sauce” of the Munich painters with his study of the Old Masters and his bravura brushwork. 

He executed this etching soon after his return to the United States, as part of a scheme to disseminate low-cost reproductions of his work to inspire further interest. Chase executed a handful of other prints, including Spanish Peasant (1978.25.1), but in general did not embrace etching with the enthusiasm of many of his contemporaries. This Is likely due in large part to his disinterest in drawing—he was overall a poor draftsman—and preference for creating his paintings directly on the canvas. This preference for freewheeling composition led to his embrace of pastels, of which he was a foremost proponent around the turn of the twentieth century. He instead turned to his outlandish and performative persona for the bulk of his marketing, soon becoming one of the most celebrated and beloved painters of his day.

Thomas Cole was born in the industrial northwest of England, where his early experiences included both artistic and vocational training, specifically as an apprentice textile engraver. He immigrated to the United States with his family at the age of seventeen, eventually finding work as an engraver. He taught himself to paint, launching a career as a landscape artist over his father’s strenuous objections. His early exposure to European–particularly English–artistic traditions situated him perfectly to take advantage of his new home, and he began making sketching trips to the Catskills and other mountainous areas of the American Northeast. He capitalized on early successes to become the exemplar of a new, American school of landscape painting, quickly becoming known for both allegorical sequences such as The Voyage of Life (National Gallery of Art, Washington) and scenes of specific locations such as The Oxbow (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).  

This painting exists in the latter mode, depicting the famed Catskill Mountain House, a hotel and tourist attraction that brought painters as well as vacationers from throughout the country. Cole, who from 1827 was a resident of the nearby village of Catskill, had a complex relationship with the Mountain House. He wrote fondly of visiting the place, and often used it as a stop in his rambling throughout the surrounding hills. At the same time, he despaired of the changes wrought by the hotel and other economic development, in particular the tanneries, mills, and other industries that rapidly overtook the area in the 1830s and 1840s. This painting is a register of his rage and despair at these changes, as the titular house is dwarfed by the awesome power of a thunderous storm. In a sense, it shows Cole attempting to reverse the ravages of time, returning his beloved Catskills to their state when he first encountered them, undoing decades of environmental degradation.  

Born in England, Timothy Cole immigrated to the United States when he was five, apprenticing in the shop of a company that made wood-engraved diagrams of machinery. Wood engraving, which was invented by Englishman Thomas Bewick at the end of the eighteenth century, involves using an engraver’s tool—called a burin—to make an image on the tough end grain of a piece of wood. The result, which combines the durability of woodcut with the precision of copperplate engraving, was the preferred method for reproductive printmaking in the nineteenth century, especially because the wood blocks could be made at type height for easy incorporation into magazine, newspaper, and book printing.

Cole eventually found his way to The Century Magazine, which sent him to Europe to make engravings of masterpieces of European painting, thereby bringing them to readers who would otherwise have no opportunity to go themselves. A Frosty Morning is one such work, based on an 1813 painting of the same title by Joseoph Mallord William Turner, now at the Tate, and demonstrates Cole’s mastery of the medium. His innovative working method involved coating his wood plate with photographic emulsion so that he could print an image of the painting he was copying directly on the surface. Then, he sat in the gallery and worked, looking at the painting in a mirror, to match the effect of the photographic reversal. Using incredibly fine burins, he was able to achieve stunning effects of tone, carefully removing tiny amounts of wood to create the white spaces in the composition. The process was so time-consuming that Cole was able to produce only one or two such images a year.

Born in St. Louis, Paul Cornoyer studied at the St. Louis School of Art from the age of 17 while he saved up to study in Paris. In 1889, when he was 25, he was finally able to embark on a multiyear trip to the French capital, enrolling at the Academie Julian and studying in the studios of French masters including Jules Lefebrve, Louis Blanc, and Benjamin Constant. Returning to St. Louis, he quickly moved to the top of the local art scene, winning prizes and commissions. One of his paintings, which he entered in an exhibition in Philadelphia, came to the attention of William Merritt Chase, himself briefly a St. Louis resident early in his career. Chase urged Cornoyer to move to New York, which he quickly did. There he established himself amid the group of artists—including John Henry Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, and Childe Hassam—who are variously known as Tonalists and American Impressionists.  

Like many artists of his generation, Cornoyer spent his summers on the shore, in his case in Gloucester, Massachusetts. It was his depictions of New York, however, which brought him the most notice. Like the Impressionists, whose work he had encountered during his time in Paris, Cornoyer was interested in the effects of light and atmosphere in a single place during different times of day, weather conditions, and seasons. His New York scenes thus mostly focus on a few places, most notably parks. He made rainy scenes something of a specialty, becoming especially praised for his depiction of wet pavement. In this painting, an excellent example of his depictions of rainy New York, the sky seems to lighten as the rain peters out, while the shimmering reflections of pedestrians and carriages on the ground indicate that it has until recently been raining quite heavily.  

hese two comic strips are the work of Roy Crane, one of the pioneers of the adventure strip genre that dominated American newspapers in the middle of the twentieth century. The strips, which date from ten years apart, are both daily entries from his first successful strip, Wash Tubbs. The story of the eponymous hero—short for Washington Tubbs II—Wash Tubbs saw its protagonist ranging all over the world visiting exotic places both real and fictional. Wherever he went, Wash—the worried-looking figure with curly hair in the first panel of Untitled (Lookout)—sought both his fortune and the love of a local beauty, though he rarely succeeded in either pursuit.

In addition to formulating the conventions of the adventure strip genre, Crane was an innovator in his mixture of cartoonish characters and realistic backgrounds. He used Craftint doubletone illustration board, a chemically treated type of paper that allowed him to achieve a wide range of gray tones and fine details, to evoke whatever exotic land Wash was visiting that week. The strips—in particular Untitled (Infatuation), in which Wash is visiting Mexico—are also artifacts of their time, reproducing the class and ethnic assumptions of Crane’s American audience.

Ralston Crawford first came to prominence in the 1930s for his sharply linear depictions of American industry, an interest that aligned him with the Precisionist movement. His depictions of grain elevators, factories, and modern highways were informed by his study of French modernism, in particular Cubism, lending his work a flat, partially abstract aspect. Unlike many of his colleagues, Crawford refused to avoid service during World War II, and was assigned to the Visual Presentation Unit, Weather, of the Army Air Force, where he used his modernist style to streamline the presentation of weather data to the high command in Washington, D.C. After the war he was the only artist present at the nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll. His experience of military life and the atom bomb deeply unsettled him, inaugurating a less optimistic and more abstract style that he maintained until the end of his life.

This painting dates from this later period, when Crawford traveled frequently, supplementing his income as an artist with temporary teaching positions and illustration work for magazines such as Life and Fortune. One of a series depicting Havana Harbor, the flat planes of color and slashing lines evoke a feeling, rather than depicting a specific place. Crawford’s late career work demonstrates his increasing interest in the interplay and tension between order, chaos, and destruction, a dynamic which is enhanced by the spare palette and sharp angles of this painting. Crawford was a steadily successful artist from the 1940s onward, but he attracted little critical attention, largely because his Cubist-derived geometry fell increasingly out of fashion as the Surrealist-inflect Abstract Expressionist movement came to dominate American art.

Born in rural Wisconsin to an impoverished itinerant preacher, Edward S. Curtis eventually ended up in Seattle, Washington, where he became the co-proprietor of a portrait photography business. He soon discovered a passion and aptitude for the medium. A chance encounter led him to be invited on the 1899 expedition to Alaska sponsored by railroad magnate Edward H. Harriman alongside a number of prominent anthropologists and scientists. Though he had previously made portraits of local Native Americans, it was on the Harriman Expedition that Curtis discovered his interest in ethnographic photography, eventually leading to his decision to create his forty-volume opus The American Indian. Consisting of over 2200 photogravure images and over 5000 pages of text, the project took decades to complete, even with the financial and publicity support of such luminaries as President Theodore Roosevelt and J.P. Morgan.

This image was taken in 1907, early in the project’s history, and appears in the third volume. It shows Curtis’s signature blending of Pictorialist art photography and supposedly scientific ethnographic imagery. Shield, like many of Curtis’s sitters, is shown wearing a traditional costume and hairstyle. Curtis, like many of his contemporaries, was a believer in the “vanishing race,” the notion that American Indians represented an ancient, static culture that was destined to disappear from the world. By representing his sitters in traditional costumes, Curtis helped to advance this hypothesis while also playing into contemporary expectations of what Native people looked like. At the same time, however, Curtis uses the hazy, soft focus that was characteristic of fine art photography at the time. Shield’s downturned, careworn face indicates that Curtis also sought to represent his sitters as individuals. Both of these factors undermine the photo’s ethnographic intent. His photos’ beauty also caused a revival in regard for Curtis’s work starting around 1970, when his work became increasingly appreciated for its poetic beauty.

The Rollins Museum of Art is home to a particularly fine collection of paintings, drawings, and prints by the American artist Arthur Bowen Davies. Davies was instrumental to the development of modern art in the United States, serving as the primary organizer of the International Exhibition of Modern Art, commonly known as the Armory Show. Through it, Americans got their first taste of European modern art, including works by Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and other important members of the avant-garde. Davies, who mostly lived a secretive, buttoned-up life, was hailed for his almost instinctual understanding of modernism, even as he ruffled feathers with his near-dictatorial control of the exhibition.

The gift of Virginia Keep Clark, herself an artist and illustrator as well as a friend of Davies, the collection represents the full breadth of his artistic production, which included landscape as well as figurative painting. Davies specialized in depictions of nudes in landscapes, often the same figure repeated in slight variations of the same position. Davies referred to these multiple figures as examples of “continuous composition.” They were inspired by his study of the photographic motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge, the paintings of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, and ancient—particularly Greek—art. This lithograph is one such example, showing the same muscular figure at two different points in the process of lifting himself up by his arms.

Davies was originally influenced by the luminous Romanticism of the American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder and the French Symbolists. Like Ryder, he often failed to clearly name or date his canvases, and he frequently returned to them, reworking them over the course of years or even decades. This untitled and undated painting is one such example and could date any time from the 1890s to 1920s. Davies is known to have taken at least one trip to the Rocky Mountains and was also fond of mountains he saw in Italy during his frequent travels there. Regardless of the source material, this small, luminous painting is a prime example of Davies’s landscape style. Thinly painted bands of blue denote foothills, mountain, and sky, with bits of the wood panel on which it is painted peeking through, giving the whole scene a cool, otherworldly quality. The effect is one of a personal—and deeply spiritual—experience of the landscape, rather than an attempt to render objective reality.

Arthur B. Davies was known in his own time as a rigid and secretive man who rarely allowed visitors to his studio, a practice which he claimed allowed him to focus on his work. Only a few of his closest friends knew the truth, which was the secrecy was designed to deflect attention from his scandalous personal life. Davies was officially married to Virginia Meriweather Davies, one of the first female physicians in New York State, but also maintained a second household in the city with Edna Potter, a ballet dancer who had been one of his models. Upon his death his wife destroyed much of his correspondence and other archives, likely due to a combination of anger and a desire to protect her family’s reputation. This lack of an archive has sometimes frustrated scholars’ ability to date his work and otherwise construct a chronology of his life.

For many years Davies’s art was overshadowed by this scandal and his contributions to the Armory Show, but in recent years scholars have begun to explore his engagement with contemporary cultural practices. In particular, Davies was interested in body postures, which he encountered through a blend of theosophy and other new spiritual movements, modern dance, ancient Greek art, and his own practice of breathing exercises designed to control his angina. Of particular interest was what he called the “lift of inhalation,” which he believed gave art its spiritual power. This mezzotint is a prime example of a common theme in his art, which is the depiction of nude women at the moment of maximum expansion of the chest. The model’s athletic arms and active posture help to achieve Davies’s desired feeling of mythic and timeless spirituality.

In addition to his interest in physical and body cultures, Davies’s art demonstrated a longtime interest in dreams and the unconscious. The turn of the twentieth century saw an increase of interest in dreams, prompted by a widespread belief in the link between dreams and creativity, as well as explorations of the occult and psychic phenomena in the first decade of the century. The interest in dreams was accelerated after 1909, when Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung toured the United States, touching off a mania for psychoanalysis. This lithograph depicts a nude woman sitting on the back of a donkey, which joins a pair of goats in languidly browsing at some nearby shrubs. Birds flit about, landing on and near the woman, whose tilted head and elongated neck suggest an extended reverie. The soft, sketchy use of line and shading furthers the unreal effect, suggesting a return to a mythological, Arcadian dreamworld.

This striking print is the work of influential Boston photographer F. Holland Day. Day, the son of wealthy parents who encouraged him to follow his interests, was a leading American participant in the aesthetic movement in the late nineteenth century. Influenced by William Morris, whose Kelmscott Press was a model for Day’s firm Copeland & Day, which published lavish editions of works by Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and other aesthetes, Day spent his formative years in Boston developing his artistic tastes and interests in a variety of subjects, including bookmaking, theatre, and photography. Eventually, he settled on photography as his preferred medium, and became an early champion of photography as a fine art, as opposed to merely a technical and scientific tool.

Though his fame today has been eclipsed by that of fellow photography advocate Alfred Stieglitz, who was born just six months before him in 1864, Day was renowned in his time for portraits like this one, which he took of friends, family, professional models, and several of the disadvantaged teenagers he mentored through his charitable work from the late 1880s onward. The model, who may be Gertrude Savage, one of Day’s classmates at Boston’s Chauncy School, stares out at the viewer with dark, luminous eyes, her voluminous hair only partially constrained by the patterned scarf thrown loosely over her head. An avowed amateur, Day did not believe that artistic or technical training was necessary to make good photographs, but he did believe in understanding and assimilating—almost on a spiritual level—how painters made images. In this and other portraits of this time he shows a profound understanding of chiaroscuro, the contrast of dark and light for dramatic effect.

When scholars originally rediscovered Joseph Decker’s work in the middle of the twentieth century, they were faced with a conundrum: there seemed to be two Joseph Deckers, each painting in two related but ultimately quite different styles. The first, represented by a smaller number of works, practiced the hard-edged, ultra-precise realism characteristic of other late-nineteenth-century trompe l’oeil painters like William M. Harnett and John F. Peto. The second, who was much more prolific, was characterized by a soft, textural aesthetic. After further research, it was determined that the two bodies of work were by the same man, who had undergone a radical shift in his style around 1890.  

Born in Germany, Joseph Decker immigrated to Brooklyn with his family as a teenager, eventually studying at the National Academy of Design before returning to Germany to study in Munich. It was there that he developed his style of minute realism, perhaps also influenced by the illustrations on commercial seed packets he found upon his return to the United States. This painstaking style was popular among certain middle-class consumers, but was largely reviled by the professional art press. As a result of some combination of the difficulty of the style and its lack of critical success, Decker largely stopped participating in the public art world around 1890, though he continued to paint, albeit now in a new, softer style. This painting is in that second mode, which likely dates it after 1890. The rich, hazy texture of the berries–a favorite subject–is in line with the Tonalist movement, which emphasized softness and the qualities of light and texture over realism.  

The Reverend Robert Furman was a Protestant minister and was associated with the abolitionist movement. He resided in Syracuse, New York, and this fine portrait has been attributed to Charles Loring Elliott, who was also from Syracuse. Elliot left Syracuse to live in New York City in order to become a respected artist around 1830, only to return to Syracuse six months later. Undeterred, he continued working as a portraitist and by 1845 had been declared the best American portraitist since Gilbert Stuart. It was estimated in 1867 that he had painted over seven hundred portraits. This picture came to Rollins College from the estate of Dr. John Martin, whose wife, Prestonia Mann Martin, was the granddaughter of the Furmans. Mrs. Martin carried on her family's forward-thinking ways. She was involved in the American Fabian Society, a socialist group modeled on the British Fabian Society, which argued that socialism should be advanced through gradual reformist measures rather than by revolutionary means. For a time, she was involved in the founding of a utopian community near North Elba, New York. She also authored a book, Prohibiting Poverty (1933), in which she argued that the necessary toils of life should be turned over to a conscript army made up of 18-26 year olds. After their own period of service, the people of this society were free to live secure in the knowledge that their needs would be met by the conscripts.

This likeness of Melinda Wilkins Furman is an excellent example of mid-nineteenth-century American portraiture. The austerity of the setting befits the wife of a Protestant minister. The focus of the portrait is the sitter’s finely painted face. She looks out with kind, meek eyes. Faint lines of experience are seen on her forehead and around her mouth. Her dress is of very good quality without being ostentatious. Her husband, the Reverend Robert Furman, was associated with the abolitionist movement. The Furmans resided in Syracuse, New York, and this fine portrait has been attributed to Charles Loring Elliott, who was also from Syracuse. Elliot left Syracuse to live in New York City in order to become a respected artist around 1830, only to return to Syracuse six months later. Undeterred, he continued working as a portraitist and by 1845 had been declared the best American portraitist since Gilbert Stuart. It was estimated in 1867 that he had painted over seven hundred portraits. This picture came to Rollins College from the estate of Dr. John Martin, whose wife, Prestonia Mann Martin, was the granddaughter of the Furmans. Mrs. Martin carried on her family's forward-thinking ways. She was involved in the American Fabian Society, a socialist group modeled on the British Fabian Society, which argued that socialism should be advanced through gradual reformist measures rather than by revolutionary means. For a time, she was involved in the founding of a utopian community near North Elba, New York. She also authored a book, Prohibiting Poverty (1933), in which she argued that the necessary toils of life should be turned over to a conscript army made up of 18-26 year olds. After their own period of service, the people of this society were free to live secure in the knowledge that their needs would be met by the conscripts.

Born on his parents’ farm outside of Cincinnati, John Joseph Enneking served in the Union Army during the Civil War. During his convalescence from a wartime injury he resumed his childhood pursuit of drawing. After the war he blended the study of art with work in the tin wholesaling business, but an economic downturn caused his business to close. Encouraged by his wife, Mary, he decided to study art full-time, moving with her and their two young children to Europe in 1872. There they traveled in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and France. His painting, which had been in the tightly naturalistic Hudson River School style, began to loosen up under the influence of the Barbizon and Munich paintings he encountered in Europe.

When the Ennekings arrived in Paris they befriended Barbizon painter Charles-François Daubigny as well as Claude Monet, and Enneking began to adopt an Impressionist style. This work, executed during a brief return to the United States (the Ennekings returned to Europe in 1878), is indicative of his style during this period. Enneking was never as adventurous a colorist as many Impressionists, and here he blends the warm brown tones of the Munich school with an Impressionist facture that takes advantage of the coloristic and textural effects of pure paint. Strongly associated with the Boston School, one of Enneking’s favorite subjects was twilight in New England, and this painting demonstrates his masterful understanding of the play of light on the surface of the pond during the last moments of daylight.

Charles Fenderich, who immigrated to the United States from Switzerland in 1831, was one of the earliest practitioners of art lithography in the United States. Lithography, a printmaking process that involves drawing on a finely-ground piece of limestone, had been invented by a Bavarian named Alois Senefelder in 1796, and quickly gained popularity as a cheap way to produce sheet music and other mass-produced works on paper. The medium’s potential for creating inexpensive works of art was immediately recognized, but it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that its potential was fully realized by the company that would become Currier & Ives.

Fenderich moved to Washington, D.C. from Philadelphia in 1837, intent on creating a subscription-based Port-Folio of Living American Statesmen, based on his (correct) understanding that the success of Andrew Jackson was making ordinary Americans more interested in their elected officials. Though he never completed the full portfolio, he seems to have made a living for a time selling individual prints of popular politicians, including Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, and others. He caught the gold bug in 1849 and moved to California, subsequently appearing in San Francisco city directories as an artist for the next 40 years, though little work from his late career has been recorded.

This well-executed portrait is of Joseph Marion Hernández, who was the first representative to Congress from the Florida Territory and is often credited as the first Hispanic American to serve in Congress, which he did as a non-voting member for six months. Hernandez, a committed Jacksonian, was also a slave-holding plantation owner and served as a brigadier general during the Seminole Wars. He was the officer in charge of the detachment who captured the Seminole leader Osceola by violating a truce. After the Seminole Wars Hernandez ran unsuccessfully for the United States Senate before moving to Cuba and becoming a sugar planter, dying in 1857.

William Glackens, like many of the other artists associated with the group variously known as the Ashcan School, The Eight, and the Henri circle, got his start as an illustrator, working for newspapers in his native Philadelphia as well as national magazines including Colliers, Century, and The Saturday Evening Post. This drawing was the basis for an illustration in the Post, of a serialized story by the writer James L. Ford entitled Our American Snobs. The title refers to the so-called yellow journalism of the early twentieth century, a term for the new mass-circulation newspapers that trafficked in sensationalized and poorly sourced stories aimed at a mass audience. “The four hundred” refers to the elite of New York Society, and was coined by socialite Ward McAllister in reference to the number of people who could fit in the Manhattan ballroom of New York Society’s undisputed leader, Caroline Astor. The drawing is thus an ironic jab at the mutual dependency of the gossip press and its elite subjects.

Glackens was an inveterate sketcher, bringing his notebooks and preferred writing implements—grease pencils intended for writing on laundry packages—everywhere with him as he moved throughout New York City. Both during his career as an illustrator and later, when he transitioned to primarily working as a painter, Glackens made several preparatory drawings for each composition, using them as a way to refine both broader compositional issues and specific details. This drawing demonstrates his use his signature sketchy line as he modulates weight, thickness, and frequency in order to build up his image of wealthy men surrounded by the disreputable newspapers which covered their every move with breathless anticipation.

George Grosz was perhaps the foremost satirist of the venality and corruption of the elites of interwar German society. His caricatures—published in magazines as well as standalone portfolios—were so incendiary that he was one of the first artists targeted by the Nazis in their denunciation of modernists and leftists of all stripes. Increasingly disillusioned by his native country, he accepted a teaching position at New York’s Art Students League, arriving with his wife just eight days before Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Once there, he enthusiastically settled into the life of an émigré artist, blunting the edge of his earlier satire and working hard to become an American, rather than German, artist.

As news of Nazi atrocities filtered across the Atlantic, Grosz became increasingly in demand. Magazines, gallerists, and museums especially clamored for his earlier caricatures, ignoring his softer and less pointed American work, which was mostly in watercolor and oil rather than pen and ink. Frustrated in his desire to be accepted as an American artist, Grosz—who became an American citizen in 1938—was increasingly isolated both from the American art world and the community of expatriate Germans. One result of this isolation was his development of a more personal vision, one tinged by melancholy rather than the promise he had seen in the United States in the years before and immediately after his arrival in New York. This scene, which shows Houston Street in Lower Manhattan, is typical of these works from the middle of his New York period. The exuberant paeans to the grandeur of the Manhattan skyline from the early 1930s have been replaced by this hazy, woozy vision. A dark, sinister figure approaches from the lower right, and Grosz uses the medium of watercolor to full effect, depicting the nighttime street with a vibrating, slightly sinister claustrophobia.

George Harding was born in Philadelphia in 1882 and followed in his sister's footsteps by pursuing a career in art. He worked as an illustrator for Harper’s Monthly Magazine after graduating from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. At the start of World War I, Harding worked on the Navy’s poster recruitment committee; by 1917, he was selected to serve as a combat artist in France with the American Expeditionary Force (AEF).  

These works are from Harding’s second time as an AEF artist during World War II. He was a Marine captain, stationed in the Pacific islands to record the conflict. Painting his colleagues, Harding commemorated those he served with. Watercolor sketches of medical scenes add to the feeling of uneasiness on the battlefield and Harding’s pencil drawing of four Japanese prisoners complicates his experience of war. 

James and William Hart were born in Scotland, emigrating to the Albany, New York area with their parents in the 1830s. As youngsters, both were apprenticed to decorative painters in Albany before studying in Europe. James studied briefly with Wilhelm Schirmer at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie in 1851 before returning to Albany, where he worked and taught until 1857, when he moved to New York City. Once there, he quickly established himself as one of the city’s foremost landscape painters, doing a brisk business selling to the newly enriched financial and industrial titans of the Civil War Era. Though subsequent critics and art historians have tended to ignore the brothers, they remained popular for decades, tracking American preferences for landscape painting from the strict naturalism of the 1850s to the preference for Barbizon-style romanticism in the 1870s.

Summer Landscape is typical of Hart’s style in the 1850s, when he was lauded in the New York press for his blending of the careful naturalism advocated by English critic John Ruskin and a more poetic sensibility preferred by many American collectors, who wanted their art to carry moral and spiritual messages. Somewhat unusually, the viewer of the painting seems to float somewhere on or above a small pond, taking in the view of the water’s edge and the landscape beyond. Hart takes care to reproduce the smallest details, including blemishes on individual leaves, while also bathing the scene in a rosy golden light that would have appealed to his patrons’ desire for emotional uplift.

Like his younger brother James, William M. Hart was born in Scotland and moved to Albany, New York at a young age. In Albany, William was apprenticed to a decorative painter. He was inspired by American painter, playwright, and historian William Dunlap to become a portrait painter, spending three mostly unsuccessful years traveling throughout the Midwest—especially Michigan—in search of patrons. He then returned to Scotland, where he studied and worked as a painter. In 1853 he moved to New York City, where he was an active presence in the city’s professional artists’ organizations, including the Brooklyn Academy of Design, the National Academy of Design, and the American Society of Watercolorists.

Also like James, William worked during the 1850s in a minutely observed style inspired by the writing of John Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. By the time this painting was executed he had come to favor a style influenced by the French Barbizon School that featured looser brushwork and a preference for scenes of rural life. In fact, both Hart brothers did a lively business in such scenes, becoming particularly known for their depictions of cattle. This picture—which was originally executed in this oval format—is a fine example of the type, with a group of peasants, horses, and cattle gathered around the gently shabby ruin of a well in the foreground. From there the scene opens up on the pleasantly rolling hills of this anonymous place, which could be Scotland, France, or Upstate New York, yielding to a peek of a waterway on the distant horizon.

The French-born American scientist-artist John James Audubon was one of the most remarkable people of his—or any—era. Possessed of no artistic or scientific training, Audubon combined a lifelong love of birds with an ironclad determination to bring to fruition his Birds of America, a four-volume, 435-plate set of life-size illustrations of North American birds. Audubon crisscrossed the countryside collecting samples—in other words, shooting birds—which he then pinned to a system of grids and wires, creating life-sized watercolor drawings while the birds’ plumage remained fresh. Along the way he recorded in his journals and, eventually, in the Ornithological Biography he published alongside the Birds of America, his thoughts about the appearances, behaviors, and even flavors, of all the birds (and quite a few reptiles and mammals) he encountered.

As the attribution on this work makes clear, Audubon did not make the Birds of America alone. In fact, the translation of his watercolor drawings into the finished prints was the work of a team of dozens of artisans working under the London printmaker Robert Havell, Jr. Audubon sent his drawings to London in lead- or tin-lined waterproof tubes, where Havell and his team of engravers and etchers set to work translating them to print. After printing on the special double elephant folio paper—the largest available in the world at that time—they would go to another team of colorists, who would apply the same colors to each print in order to create uniform results. The enormous size of the prints meant that each volume weighed over 40 pounds, and the Birds of America was the largest known printed book until it was finally surpassed in 2003.

John James Audubon preferred to draw the birds for his Birds of America from freshly killed specimens, in order to best capture the delicate colors of feathers, eyes, and other features. In order to accomplish this he traveled widely, from Louisiana in what was then the southwest corner of the United States to Labrador, in the northeast corner of Canada, and all over the eastern half of the continent. He never made it very far west of the Mississippi, however, and for many of the birds of the Western United States he was forced to rely on preserved skins or whole stuffed specimens. For this plate, which depicts birds he termed the Violet-Green and Townsend’s Cormorants, but which are now known as the Pelagic and Brandt’s Cormorants, respectively, he relied on this method. The skins were sent to him by a Mr. Townsend, who shot them at Cape Disappointment, near the mouth of the Columbia River on the border of Washington and Oregon.

Audubon sought to represent his birds at full-size, a task which was easier for some species than others. These two feature twisted necks, a behavior seen in wild cormorants which Audubon may have highlighted in order to more efficiently use the page available to him. For prints where he had personal experience of the countryside Audubon frequently included a variety of detail, but for this far-away scene he has perched the two birds on a bare rock, providing only a simple seascape for a backdrop.

This pastel by the American artist Childe Hassam is somewhat unusual in his body of work. Hassam, who came to prominence in Boston as an illustrator and watercolorist before a brief sojourn in Paris to study at the famed Académie Julian, professed to be uninterested in Impressionism, the avant-garde art movement that had taken Paris by storm in the 1870s. Nevertheless, his prolific output of watercolors, oil paintings, pastels, and prints demonstrates a familiarity with Impressionist techniques, including working en plein aire—meaning outdoors and directly from life, in contrast to in a studio—and the use of small patches of relatively pure color.

This work, which includes an original frame selected by the artist (who was known for his exacting standards for frames), is a relatively rarity in Hassam’s oeuvre. While most of his scenes of New York City and the New England countryside and seacoast depict specific places, this view is of a generic country scene, possibly captured during summer trips he took to rural Connecticut. The sun-dappled building, placidly rolling carriage, and woman standing in the middle distance complement the shimmering luminosity of the road, whose intermingled strokes of blue and brown seem to suggest a flowing river as much as a hot, dusty thoroughfare. Hassam came to prominence during a time when Americans were becoming interested in historic architecture, particularly of the Colonial Era, and traced his own family lineage to seventeenth century Puritans. Scenes of this sort would have appealed to that burgeoning interest and helped to cement Hassam’s reputation as one of the foremost artists of New England scenery.

Hassam, who became known during his long and prolific career for his paintings of the New England coastline, as well as Boston and New York street scenes, is perhaps best known for his close friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, who gathered a circle of like-minded writers and artists at her inn and cottage on Appledore Island, off the coast of Rye, in southern Maine. Over many years, Hassam painted Thaxter, her gardens, and the rocky shorelines of Appledore, helping to fix an image of the thriving seaside resort culture of the turn of the twentieth century.

This painting, with its flecks of pure blue interspersed with orange, yellow, white, and green, as well as its delineation of the meeting of surf and land, fits neatly into the aesthetic Hassam developed on Appledore. Yet, this painting does not depict Appledore, but rather Ironbound Island, one of several islands in Frenchman Bay, further up the Maine coast. Frenchman Bay is best known for Mount Desert Island, home of the town Bar Harbor, another major center for coastal tourism at the turn of the twentieth century. Thaxter died in 1894, prompting Hassam to stay away from Appledore for a few years, likely out of grief. Still, the artist—always a savvy marketer of himself and his work—followed his wealthy clientele to the seaside every year, spending 1896 mixing with them in the area that would become Acadia National Park. The result was this and a number of related paintings, though this one is notable for its close focus on the forbidding cliffsides for which Ironbound has long been known.

Martin Johnson Heade first became interested in landscape painting while traveling in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where he met John Frederick Kensett and Benjamin Champney. He soon moved to New York, where he took a studio in the famed Tenth Street Studio Building, artistic home of the movement often known as the Hudson River School. He became particularly close friends with Frederic Edwin Church, whose majestic composite landscapes of South America took the country by storm in the 1850s and 1860s. Under Church’s influence, Heade traveled to Brazil, where he became fascinated by the country’s many brightly colored hummingbirds and orchids. Unlike his friend and mentor, Heade soon evolved a personal style that emphasized minute observation of flora and fauna on tiny canvases, rather than the large-scale works that brought Church such fame and fortune. His American scenes are similarly idiosyncratic, focusing on salt marshes and other liminal places usually avoided by his contemporaries.  

Later in his career, Heade–always a committed naturalist–became interested in the marshes of North Florida, moving to St. Augustine in 1883 with his new bride. He soon met Henry Flagler, who was in the process of completing his magnificent Ponce-de-Leon Hotel (now part of Flagler College). Heade became the first of several artists-in-residence at the hotel, where he turned his attention to intricately painted still-lifes of cut flowers, often magnolias laid out on velvet. This venture was so successful that Heade largely stopped sending his paintings to dealers in the North, instead selling his entire production to hotel guests. This painting of marguerites is relatively rare in his oeuvre, suggesting that he was experimenting with a new style that ultimately did not prove attractive to his customers. Nonetheless, it shows his mastery of flower painting by this period, capturing a spray of the flowers from buds to full blooms, as well as the optical effect of the water on the stems.  

Originally this portrait was thought to have been painted by the American painter George Peter Alexander Healy (1813-1894). This belief was based on the family tradition of the original owners. However, this attribution has been questioned by some scholars who feel that Healy would have been too young at the time to have painted such a fine portrait. Experts from the Vose Gallery in Boston and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington have suggested that the painting may have been done by the portraitists Chester Harding (1792-1866) or Samuel Waldo (1783-1861). The date of the painting is also difficult to determine with certainty. If the painting was completed as a companion to the portrait of the Reverend Warner's second wife, Elizabeth Warner, née Hart (also in the Cornell's collection), the date of c. 1840s would be appropriate. However, the Reverend Warner was first married to Elizabeth Hazard (d.1831) in 1829. It has been suggested that the Reverend Warner's attire is more in keeping with the fashions of the 1820s or 1830s, and it would have been common to have a portrait commissioned to celebrate a marriage. While it may seem odd that the Reverend Warner is depicted holding a bookkeeping ledger rather than a Bible, this attribute is in keeping with his position. A graduate of Yale Theological Seminary, Warner was made Treasurer of the college in 1832. The donor of this painting (and its companion piece), James Gamble Rogers II, was the great-grandson of the Reverend and Mrs. Warner. James Gamble Rogers II, a Winter Park architect, designed many of the buildings on the Rollins College campus including the Thomas Phillips Johnson Student Resource Center, Olin Library, McKean Hall, and Elizabeth Hall.

Robert Henri is perhaps best remembered today as a teacher and advocate for modern subject matter in American painting, a reputation he earned as the elder statesman of the loose affiliation of artists known as the Ashcan School. So-named by a critic who complained of their depictions of often dirty everyday life in New York City’s streets and tenement buildings, the Ashcan painters charted a new course in their embrace of the quotidian over the beautiful. Given his advocacy for this urban subject matter in the work of his friends and students, it is somewhat surprising that Henri the artist is best known for his work as a portraitist, as well as for brushy landscapes like this one.

Henri, like other men of his generation—most notably President Theodore Roosevelt—was a proponent of the “strenuous life,” a belief that physically demanding leisure pursuits were the antidote for the perceived social ills of modern, urban life. These ills included fatigue, anxiety, and other maladies brought on by the overly stimulating urban environment. For Henri, the strenuous life included encouraging frequent physical horseplay among his male students, as well as trips into the countryside to help diminish the ill effects of the city. One such trip resulted in this painting, in which Henri shows his dedication to a quick, sketch-like stroke of the brush, the better to convey his own investment in the immediacy of lived experience.

In 1913, looking for a new summer home, Henri traveled to Achill Island, which lies off the northwest coast of Ireland in the Atlantic Ocean. His interest in Ireland was prompted by his and his wife’s Irish heritage, as well as his desire to experience something different from Spain, where he had been spending his summers. Achill in particular came at the recommendation of John Butler Yeats, a painter (and the father of poet William Butler Yeats) who was a friend and sometime collaborator of Henri and the other Ashcan artists. Yeats recommended the island in part because of its rural and traditional ways of life. Henri rented an estate named Corrymore, settling in to paint a combination of the local landscapes and people. The confluence of his own financial troubles and the outbreak of World War I kept Henri from returning until 1924. When he did, he found Corrymore in the hands of the newly formed independent Irish government, which offered to sell him the property for less than he had paid to lease it in 1913. He happily purchased it, and he and his wife returned every summer until he died of pancreatic cancer in 1929.

During the 1924-1928 summer seasons, Henri focused his efforts almost entirely on painting the children of the local town of Dooagh. His wife, Marjorie, fed the children and entertained them with records on the Victrola, then a novelty for the impoverished people of the town. Henri paid the children half a crown, equivalent to a day’s wages for a male laborer at the time. He usually completed the portraits in a single sitting, applying his paint quickly and efficiently to capture the sitter’s essence rather than create an exacting likeness. Though it is titled Rosaleen, this painting actually depicts a girl named Bridget O’Reilly (the children of the island generally shared a very small number of both first and last names, which has sometimes made it difficult for scholars to determine exactly which child sat for which painting). She holds a doll, an unknown luxury for the time that must have been provided by Marjorie Henri. The portrait, one of the last Henri painted before succumbing to cancer, represents the culmination of Henri’s ideas about the power of immediacy in artistic representations.

Herzog started traveling to Florida around 1890, when he began visiting his son Lewis, who was then working as a chemist in Gainesville. The state—most of which remained undeveloped and quite wild well into the twentieth century—appealed to his interests in dense, atmospheric forests. Most of his Florida paintings depict the area around Gainesville. This is one of the few he produced during a rare trip to the East. The slow-moving river gives way to the ocean, a fisherman’s camp occupying the middle ground. The area Herzog depicts is now part of the urban landscape of Jacksonville, and Herzog has captured it during a much quieter era. His interest in lower light levels is once again apparent, with a sliver of crescent moon just giving way to the sun as it creeps over the horizon. 

Hermann Herzog was a renowned German-born American landscape artist who pursued a formal art education at the Düsseldorf Academy. He immigrated to the United States in the late 1860s; leaving behind his success in Europe, he settled in Philadelphia with his wife Anne, and son, Herman Jr. Herman moved away from exaggerated forms and trompe l’oeil under the influence of the Barbizon painters’ use of softer colors and their studies of weather and atmospheric mood. Herzog applied these new characteristics to his American paintings as he traveled frequently between 1880 and 1903 throughout the United States, and especially between Florida and the West Coast, drawn to their diverse and distinctive topographies.

The presence of elk and the mountain range in the distance suggest it is very likely that Herzog painted Sunset with Elk during one of his trips out west. The painting depicts the sublime power of nature, while exhibiting his style of capturing details through quick, rapid brushstrokes for a more naturalistic effect. His study of atmosphere to convey mood is apparent in his contrast of light and dark as the sun sets behind the clouds, creating a feeling of mystery and awe.

Both painter and sitter of this portrait lived colorful lives. Hubard was born in Shropshire, England, and showed early promise as a cutter of silhouettes. Mostly forgotten today, silhouettes of famous individuals were popular traveling attractions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Hubard, first in the company of a man named Smith and then on his own, made a good living exhibiting his in the cities of Great Britain, the United States, and Canada. The circumstances of his conversion to portrait painter are not entirely clear, though he seems to have met Gilbert Stuart while his Hubard Gallery was in Boston. By the late 1820s he was working as an itinerant painter up and down the Eastern Seaboard, making a series of portraits of famous statesmen. He settled in Gloucester County, outside Richmond, VA, by 1833. He specialized in what was then known as a cabinet picture, meaning a small-scale full-length portrait, usually done in oil and on a wood panel.  

This painting is an excellent example of his style just before he left for further training in Europe, around 1838. It depicts David Porter, who was by the time of the painting retired from naval service. Born in Boston, Porter served in the American conflict with the Barbary states before taking command of the frigate U.S.S. Essex in the War of 1812. He led a successful campaign against the British whaling fleet in the Pacific before eventually being defeated in the Battle of Valparaiso. After the war he continued in his service until a dispute with the War Department caused him to resign his commission. He later served as the Commander in Chief of the newly formed Mexican Navy until 1829, after which he was appointed to serve as a minister to the Ottoman Empire by Andrew Jackson. It was during this service that the portrait was likely made, though it is not clear where or how Hubard and Porter’s paths crossed. Hubard represents Porter in his splendor as a naval officer, posed on the battlements of an unknown (and likely imaginary) fortress.  

The creator of these drawings, Daniel Huntington, was one of the most successful and well-known artists of his day. In addition to his success as a portraitist—anyone who was anyone in New York had to have him paint their likeness—he was a long-serving president of the National Academy of Design, the premier artistic training and professional organization in the United States during the nineteenth century. Before settling into his life as a portraitist, Huntington, like many of the artists of his generation, went on a trip to Europe, beginning in 1839 and lasting three years. While overseas he took a particular liking to Rome, where he admired the work of the Nazarenes, a group of German painters who were heavily influenced by the art of the Italian Renaissance. The first of these drawings, of a hand resting on a table, was influenced by the Renaissance master Titian, and was intended to aid his completion of a now-unknown portrait. The second bears the inscription “For the Communion of the Sick,” a reference to a now-unlocated painting, one of several didactic Christian allegories Huntington made in his early career. 

These sorts of preparatory sketches were quite common in the nineteenth century, and Huntington’s close study of anatomy reveals his academic training. While serving as President of the National Academy he would champion similar training, which required close study and drawing of classical statuary, especially of recognized masterpieces like the Apollo Belvedere, before moving on to careful study of the nude model. Only after mastering drawing from life in this way would students be permitted to move on to painting in oils. Even once working in oils, painters made drawings like these to aid in their compositions, though the widespread introduction of photography in the later nineteenth century started to supplant this practice, especially among portrait painters.

The creator of these drawings, Daniel Huntington, was one of the most successful and well-known artists of his day. In addition to his success as a portraitist—anyone who was anyone in New York had to have him paint their likeness—he was a long-serving president of the National Academy of Design, the premier artistic training and professional organization in the United States during the nineteenth century. Before settling into his life as a portraitist, Huntington, like many of the artists of his generation, went on a trip to Europe, beginning in 1839 and lasting three years. While overseas he took a particular liking to Rome, where he admired the work of the Nazarenes, a group of German painters who were heavily influenced by the art of the Italian Renaissance. The first of these drawings, of a hand resting on a table, was influenced by the Renaissance master Titian, and was intended to aid his completion of a now-unknown portrait. The second bears the inscription “For the Communion of the Sick,” a reference to a now-unlocated painting, one of several didactic Christian allegories Huntington made in his early career.

These sorts of preparatory sketches were quite common in the nineteenth century, and Huntington’s close study of anatomy reveals his academic training. While serving as President of the National Academy he would champion similar training, which required close study and drawing of classical statuary, especially of recognized masterpieces like the Apollo Belvedere, before moving on to careful study of the nude model. Only after mastering drawing from life in this way would students be permitted to move on to painting in oils. Even once working in oils, painters made drawings like these to aid in their compositions, though the widespread introduction of photography in the later nineteenth century started to supplant this practice, especially among portrait painters.

Anna Hyatt Huntington’s father was a zoologist and paleontologist who taught at Boston University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She first discovered her love of animals accompanying him to zoos and natural history museums around New England. She saw early success in Boston, training under a number of prominent American sculptors, one of whom she split with over a disagreement about the proper way to represent the musculature of a horse. When her father died in 1902, she moved to New York, where she took advantage of the brisk market for statuettes—particularly of animal subjects—and the large number of other single women working as artists. She was reportedly one of the highest-paid professional women in the country, with reported earnings as high as $50,000 a year (a number which she said was slightly exaggerated). From 1906-1910 she took several trips to France, where she entered sculptures in the annual Salons.

Upon her return to New York, she increasingly turned to larger scale works for both outdoor and indoor spaces. Even as she gained success in public commissions, however, she relished the opportunity to work in a smaller scale, as she believed it kept her attentive to the minute detail of muscle and tendon beneath skin. Unlike many sculptors of equestrian subjects, she especially preferred to show horses in motion but not being ridden. In this work, in 1915, both the horse and a human figure are bent forward, buffeted by wind as they make their way slowly forward. This unusual composition allowed her to explore the limits of equine physiology as well as her own skill.

George Inness, whose career spanned the majority of the nineteenth century, was one of the most prolific and influential landscape painters of his–or any–era. Born outside New York City, he grew up in Newark, New Jersey. His artistic training was varied, including individual study with the immigrant French painter Régis François Gignoux, classes at the National Academy of Design, and apprenticeship to a number of printmakers, including Nathaniel Currier (later of Currier & Ives fame). He established his first studio in 1848, joining the many American painters who were inspired to paint American scenery by the painter Thomas Cole (who died in February of that year). By 1851 he was in Rome to study, where he likely came into contact with the precepts of Swedenborgianism, a new religious movement popular amongst the Americans there (as well as back home). Throughout his career Inness would incorporate the religion’s precepts–which include strong and ongoing connections between the spirit and material worlds–as well as other investigations in science, mathematics, and philosophy, into his art.  

Inness was also a keen student of other art movements, and his style shifted markedly throughout his life as he incorporated a variety of artistic and philosophical concepts into his work. He also was in the habit of continually revising paintings, sometimes years later (often to the chagrin of the paintings’ owners), which makes tracing the chronology of his over 1000 known works challenging. This painting–or perhaps finished study–is dated 1867, and is consistent with his style of the 1860s. During this period Inness lived first in Medfield, Massachusetts and then back in New Jersey. In both places he was interested in sunny, picturesque scenes, though often threatened by towering, darkening clouds. As a result, many paintings of this era depict the moments just before or after the onset of thunderstorms, as in this painting, where heavy thundercaps threaten the otherwise peaceful scene.  

This painting, executed around the same time as Approaching Storm, is exemplary of Inness’s finished landscape style of the late 1860s. Depicting one of the most common subjects for the group of American landscape painters sometimes known as the Hudson River School, it also shows the influence of that group upon Inness. Like many painters working in the prevailing landscape style of the middle of the nineteenth century, including Thomas Cole, Worthington Whittredge, and Jervis McEntee (all in this exhibition), Inness is not interested in a direct representation or transcription of a real world scene with this painting. Instead, this is what is known as a composite landscape, meaning Inness took elements from a variety of locations and combined them into one scene. This allowed him to integrate a variety of compositional elements, including river, forest, mountains, and sky.  

This painting shows Inness’s mastery of the landscape style known as the picturesque, in which elements of the beautiful and the sublime are held in perfect harmony. The composition is anchored by the looming dome of the mountain and a soaring patch of clouds, speaking to the awesome power of God’s majesty. The foreground, meanwhile, is dominated by the placidly flowing river, the banks of which are grazed by a herd of cattle. Inness includes ample evidence of human habitation, particularly in the middle ground. The river pulls the viewer’s attention deeper into the composition, helping reinforce the synthesis between wilderness and civilization that characterizes this mode of painting.  

William Henry Jackson served as an official photographer for the U.S. Geological Survey from 1870 to 1878, accompanying its director Ferdinand V. Hayden and a number of scientists, surveyors, and fellow artists on annual journeys throughout the American West, in particular in the spectacular mountain ranges of the Wyoming Rockies. Officially he was to provide scientific images of the Western landscape, though he often abandoned the conventions of scientific photography, which required accuracy and precision, in favor of the poetic grandiosity favored by landscape painters of the time. In fact, a number of famous landscape painters accompanied the Survey during the years of Jackson’s involvement, including Sanford Robinson Gifford and Thomas Moran, the latter of whom would form a lifelong friendship with Jackson.

Jackson, as an early and prolific photographer of the American West, did a great deal to shape the popular vision of the West as a sublimely beautiful but also accessible wonderland. He thus participated in the discourse known as Manifest Destiny, which saw it as the inevitable and natural right of Americans of European descent to occupy the North American continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. Jackson was not—in contrast with others of his time and since—an explicit advocate of the dispossession of Native Americans from the land. Instead, he sought to depict the wide-open spaces of the West as he experienced them, though his emphasis on these empty expanses helped to reinforce the notion that the West was wide open, ripe for settlement.

As Jackson matured as a photographer his interests shifted from the horizontal visions of his earlier works to more vertical imagery, with the fearsome peaks of the Rockies coming to replace the open plains of Eastern Wyoming. This image, taken from Mount Lincoln, demonstrates that preference. Its sheer, icy monumentality nearly blots out the sky, and Jackson has framed the picture with only the barest hint of foreground on which the viewer’s eye can take hold. This image was also sold as part of a multi-print panorama showing a much larger proportion of the view from the mountain, enabling a purchaser to experience both the vertical and horizontal majesty of the Rocky Mountains.

Like many Americans of his generation, John Wesley Jarvis was born in England, though he was in Philadelphia with his family by the age of six. He was apprenticed to an engraver, eventually striking out on his own in that business. Around the age of twenty-four he decided to become a portrait painter, quickly learning the profession. He established himself in New York just as it was solidifying its place as the young country’s preeminent social and economic center, quickly becoming the city’s leading portrait painter. Lacking the political connections and European training of some of his rivals, he instead relied on his prodigious talents as a storyteller, turning portrait sessions into a kind of entertainment for the sitter. When the market in New York hit a lull he hit the road, finding particular success in Baltimore, Charleston, and New Orleans, each a regional economic and social center.  

McCoun, the sitter for this portrait, was born to a wealthy family in Manhattan, eventually ending up in Troy, New York, where he settled in as one of the town’s leading citizens. He is here represented in Jarvis’s signature style, which emphasized the physical immediacy of the sitter’s body, particularly his face. He is represented as if he has just looked up from a book he is reading, a common tactic of portraiture intended to emphasize the sitter’s education and breeding. The background is also typical of Jarvis’s mature style, which preferred these sorts of roiling forms to the more allegorical or naturalistic backgrounds of many of his rivals.  

Gertrude Käsebier was forty-five when she first began her photography career, having studied at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute after her three children were old enough to be less demanding of her time. Her teachers—who included influential painter and printmaker Arthur Wesley Dow—were horrified when she turned to photography, which was then regarded as merely a mechanical tool, rather than an artistic medium. Her experimental photographic process, which made use of older techniques like gum printing and the platinum print, aligned her with the nascent movement of Pictorialism. In particular, she drew the attention of Alfred Stieglitz, who was in the process of founding the Photo-Secession, an influential organization of American photographers which argued for the artistic nature of the medium. Käsebier, unlike other members of the group—who prized their amateur status—also maintained a thriving private portrait business, applying her artistic principles to her likenesses of many of the most famous women of the day.

This blend of commercial and artistic goals and techniques hit an early peak in 1898, when she wrote to Buffalo Bill Cody, asking his permission to photograph a number of the Sioux performers in his popular Wild West show when it next came to Madison Square Garden. Upon arriving at her studio early on the appointed day, she was surprised to find the nine men waiting for her. Hastily assembling a meal of tea and “frankfurters on unbuttered bread,” she set up her camera and got to work, capturing a series of both formal and informal portraits. Though the men had arrived in the war bonnets and other finery they wore for the Wild West, Käsebier worked hard to capture them in less guarded moments. In this picture—which would become the most famous of the series—a young man named Takes Enemy playfully threw a blanket around his head, which Käsebier quickly captured. The resulting print, with its soft focus and penetrating focus on the sitter’s face, is a tour-de-force of Pictorialist photography.

Like many artists of his generation, John F. Kensett originally trained as an engraver, working with his father and uncle, who were immigrants from a long line of English artisans, before moving to New York to establish himself as a bank note engraver. There he met Asher Brown Durand, who had accomplished the transition from bank note engraver to landscape painter a decade earlier, in the 1830s. Similarly inspired, Kensett joined  Durand and fellow painter John Casliear on a trip to Europe, where he spent several years sketching scenery in Britain and on the Continent. When he returned he quickly established himself in the New York art world, selling paintings—primarily of the natural scenery of New York and New England—to the city’s burgeoning commercial elite.

In 1856 Kensett returned to England, making preparatory sketches for this painting in the scenic Lake District. The painting—the largest of several known versions of the work—demonstrates Kensett’s mastery of the landscape aesthetic as practiced by American painters in the middle of the nineteenth century. A gently winding dirt path enters the picture at the lower right, lending the viewer easy visual access to the placid scene. A small figure, seated on the cliff overlooking the lake, encourages further identification, while the boat-dotted lake itself winds back towards distant mountains, unifying the scene in a pleasing vision of human activity and natural splendor brought together in glorious harmony.

As well known for his adventurous persona—which he developed through numerous mythopoetic memoirs of his time spend in Newfoundland, Alaska, Greenland, and other harsh and forbidding locales—as his art, which encompassed painting, printmaking, advertising, and commercial illustration, Rockwell Kent was one of the most prolific and highly-regarded artists of his time. After a period in which he established himself as America’s foremost chronicler of life in the Arctic, Kent spent much of the 1920s and 1930s mingling with the elite of Hollywood and the New York publishing world, periodically retreating to his farm in the Adirondacks to complete paintings and commissions. Alarmed by the growing threat of Nazism, Kent became an increasingly committed socialist during the 1930s, a commitment which he maintained even after victory in World War II led to the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1940s and 1950s. These commitments even saw him hauled before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s infamous Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Kent invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, a decision which—along with his gift of hundreds of paintings and drawings to the people of the Soviet Union in 1960—caused his reputation to decline in the United States, as did his figurative style, which was increasingly out of step with the taste for Abstract Expressionism in the postwar years.

This print, one of 150 made in collaboration with master lithographer George Miller for the Print Club of Albany, demonstrates both Kent’s political commitments and his late-career mastery of the medium. A lone barefoot woman, her posture stooped and weary from the heavy bucket she carries (Kent is reported to have preferred the name The Water Carrier for the print), looks over her shoulder as she pauses in her toil. She is bathed in an intense, eerie light that suggests both the light of Divine Providence and Kent’s earlier depictions of mythic figures in the strange light of northern skies, an association reinforced by the lone mountain in the background and bare stone of the ground on which she stands. Built up out of the rich, velvety tones uniquely possible with the medium of lithography, the print transmogrifies this lone woman into an avatar for Kent’s understanding of the burdens faced by the toiling classes everywhere.

In this painting by American artist Susan Ricker Knox, three women sit at a table in a garden having tea. They seem to be immersed in conversation. How do they know each other? Are they friends or relatives? Does the title of the painting offer any clues? Knox was born in New Hampshire and studied art in Philadelphia and New York before traveling to Europe. Although she became well known for a series of paintings depicting European immigrants at Ellis Island, this work portrays an intimate interaction between three society women. The identity of the sitters is not known; however, several accounts indicate Knox painted the scene during or shortly after a trip to Charleston, South Carolina to visit family friends.

Walt Kuhn is best remembered today for his contributions to the landmark 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art. Often referred to as the Armory Show, this exhibition brought European modernism to large American audiences for the first time, setting off a flurry of debate about the relationships among Europe, America, modernism, and more traditional modes of art-making. Kuhn’s tireless administration of the massive exhibition has long defined his legacy, but more recently scholars have come to appreciate his modern painting style, which blended cubism, a colorful expressionism derived from Fauvism, and Kuhn’s lifelong love of burlesque dancers and circus performers to create incisive portraits of these fascinating urban types.

This drawing—of an unknown sitter—comes from a key moment in Kuhn’s life. Having almost died of an ulcer in 1925, he had redoubled his commitment to his own art, beginning to develop the aesthetic for which he would become best known. He also had an exhibition of his drawings at New York’s Knoedler Gallery in 1928, and the scribbled-out directions on the edges of this piece may have been his instructions for matting and framing it for that or another show. Kuhn depicts this woman with a melancholy elegance that contrasts markedly with his often-coarse depictions of showgirls, adding extra mystery to her identity. This may have been a preparatory drawing for a painting, though which is unclear. Kuhn—like many artists—destroyed many of his works that he found unsatisfactory, and so if this was a drawing made in preparation for another work we may never know which one. Nonetheless, the work stands as testament to Kuhn’s eye as a draftsman, which allowed him to construct this figure out of an economy of bold, sweeping lines.

This painting, a second version of one of the earliest works of American modernist painter Jacob Lawrence, exemplifies his early style. Lawrence, whose parents participated in the Great Migration of African Americans to Northern cities in the early decades of the twentieth century, moved to Harlem with his mother in 1930. There, he was inspired by the vivid street life of America’s premier African American neighborhood, quickly gaining fame as a leading artist of the Harlem Renaissance while he was still in his early twenties. In this scene he shows Black customers and neighbors standing outside a White-owned butcher shop, while the busy traffic of a city street whizzes by.

Lawrence worked primarily in gouache, also known as opaque watercolor, a medium which allowed him maximum control over the colors in his work. He was careful to do every area of each color all at once, ensuring that all of his blue—for example—was consistently applied across the painting. Gouache’s opacity helped with this process, allowing him to layer colors on top of one another without any bleeding or blending of the pigments. Lawrence’s inspiration by everyday black life led him to the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where he became interested in works by historians, including W.E.B. Du Bois. He applied this gouache technique to increasingly elaborate depictions of African American history, culminating in the Migration Series in 1941, a set of sixty gouache panels that was funded by the WPA and incorporated his readings in Black history as well as his increasing familiarity with and mastery of modernist styles.  

Born to a prominent Canadian family, Ernest Lawson had permanently relocated to New York City by 1898, where he took an apartment in the burgeoning neighborhood of Washington Heights. Situated on the north end of the island of Manhattan, Washington Heights was at the turn of the twentieth century a borderland, with dense apartment blocks closely abutting mostly wild forest. Lawson quickly made it his project to depict this rapidly changing landscape, sticking with the subject matter even after he moved downtown in 1906. It was this attention to the ragged edge of America’s largest city—as well as his painterly style, informed by study on both sides of the Atlantic—that led Lawson to his association with the group of artists known variously as The Eight, the Ashcan School, and the Henri Circle, a loose affiliation of painters who stood opposed to the conservative National Academy of Design and in favor of new, urban subject matter.

Especially during his early time in New York, Lawson repeated his subjects frequently, preferring his usual haunts along the Harlem River and Spuyten Duyvil Creek, which connects the Harlem with the Hudson River. Though the exact spot for this painting is unknown, it may be the Harlem River. Lawson particularly specialized in the winter landscape, which he learned to paint under the tutelage of American painter John Henry Twachtman at the beginning of his career. Lawson’s handling of the paint in this work is typical for this period of his career, when he used a palette knife to heap thick patches of pure pigment atop one another, giving his canvases a structural quality that contemporary critics frequently remarked upon. The boats at the water’s edge and the rough red shack in the left middle ground give the scene a bucolic air, while the masses of what might be buildings in the background hint at the transformation to become.

Born in the gold rush town of Castlemaine, Australia, near Melbourne, Martin Lewis studied for a time to become a mining engineer before setting off to travel, spending several years working as a fence post digger and merchant seaman before ending up in San Francisco, where he worked as a commercial illustrator for William McKinley’s successful presidential campaign. Relocating to New York, he continued to work as an illustrator while aligning himself with the bohemian, leftist circle around the poet Lola Ridge that also included literary and artistic figures such as Jack London, Emma Goldman, and John Sloan. By 1920 he had saved up enough money to quit his commercial work and move to Japan. Intending to remain permanently, he seems to have had trouble adjusting and was back in New York by 1922, where he resumed his commercial work until later in the decade, when he was able to support himself fully with his printmaking work.

Like many Europeans and Americans around the turn of the twentieth century, Lewis was interested in Japanese art, in particular ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Upon his return from Japan this interest intensified, inflecting much of his later work. In this print, the influence is shown most clearly in his attention to the everyday social relationships of urban dwellers and his strong sense of line. Depicting the corner of 34^th Street and Park Avenue—near his Manhattan studio—the print draws a sense of dramatic urgency from the jagged arc of a lightning bolt, giving the work a sense that the storm could redouble its violent assault at any moment.

The onset of the Great Depression caused Lewis and his wife to sell their Greenwich Village home and move to Sandy Hook, Connecticut, but Lewis was restless in the countryside, and by the onset of World War II they were back in New York. Unlike other artists, Lewis declined to work for the Federal Art Project, and he had trouble selling prints in the contracted economy of the Depression. As a result, his production tailed off significantly in the 1930s and 1940s. This is one of his best-known pieces from his later career, showing his mastery of both complex compositions and the interplay of light and dark. Lewis specialized in nighttime scenes, and his vignette of two young people meeting outside of a five-and-dime is illuminated by the bright electric light from inside the store, which contrasts with the softer light of streetlamps reflected in the windows of a neighboring business.

Dating from his years in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, this print demonstrates Lewis’s interest in everyday social occasions blended with his keen eye for the detail of his rural home. It also demonstrates his mastery of a variety of intaglio printmaking techniques. Lewis was a master at both etching and engraving, using both in his execution of this print. Starting with a smoothly polished copper plate, he coated it in an even layer of wax, the traditional preparation for etching. Using sandpaper, emery paper, or loose sand (or some combination thereof), he then created a series of minute pits in the wax’s surface. Dipping the plate in a bath of acid—biting, in the etcher’s terminology—he thus gave the plate a soft, uneven texture. The scene itself was then created using the medium of drypoint, a kind of engraving that uses a thin needle to achieve precise details. Lewis’s preference for soft, atmospheric scenes like this one indicate the influence on him of the pictorialist photography of the Photo-Secession as exemplified by Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, with which he was familiar from his earlier days among New York’s bohemian literary set.

Jonas Lie was a successful painter and prominent member of the New York City art world in the first decades of the twentieth century. Unlike many of his peers, Lie—whose namesake was his uncle, the Norwegian novelist of the same name—was comfortable both in the conservative Establishment as exemplified by the National Academy of Design and in more avant-garde circles. Indeed, Lie contributed five paintings to the famed International Exhibition of Modern Art of 1913, more popularly known as the Armory Show. His interest in modernism was piqued during a 1909-1910 trip to his native Norway, during which he spent a few months in Paris, where he saw works by Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, and other French modernists in the famed collection of American expatriates Gertrude and Leo Stein. 

This work, pained just after Lie’s return from that trip, reflects a new interest in his work. Inspired in part by his move from Plainfield, New Jersey back to Manhattan (he took a room in a boarding house near Washington Square Park, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood), Lie began to incorporate more cityscapes into his work. In this he was following in the footsteps of Monet and other Impressionists, whose depictions of Paris record the fleeting effects of light and air in the modern metropolis. Dusk on Lower Broadway is relatively rare among Lie’s cityscapes in that it does not include a river or other water view, though the artist has represented the famed thoroughfare with shimmering patches of pure color that recall the effect of cool winter light on the water. Looking north, the viewer is immediately aware of the city’s ever-growing height, and the way individual people seem to be dwarfed by its man-made canyons.

As with a number of his peers, George Luks worked as an illustrator for Philadelphia newspapers before relocating to New York at the behest of Robert Henri, the teacher and mentor who was the driving force behind The Eight, a 1908 exhibition of urban realist art produced by the painters of what would become known as the Ashcan School. Though his formal artistic training was spotty–he dropped out of two different art schools after only one month of study–Luks took his art seriously, with a willingness to change his style to suit his evolving needs as an artist. This seriousness stands in contrast to his personal life, in which he was fond of inventing wildly implausible backstories for himself, including a past as a professional boxer. He once declared that he and Franz Hals, a Dutch Golden Age artist known for his earthy depictions of everyday people, were the only great artists in human history.  

As his affinity for Dutch genre painting might suggest, Luks was a great chronicler of working-class life in the city, gaining fame for his frank depictions of poverty amongst the tenements. Later in his career, after having moved uptown and away from the city’s urban core, Luks left behind scenes of tenement life, resulting in a shift in both his palette and subject matter towards greater lightness. Though the painters who made up The Eight were bound not so much by their shared aesthetics as a viewpoint that emphasized the raw stuff of urban life, Luks himself shared much in common with his mentor Henri, who also turned to portraits of children later in his career. Also as with Henri, Luks likely did not execute these portraits on commission, but rather because he was intrigued by the aesthetic possibilities of youthful faces. He captures the face of Ruth Breslin with a sharp forthrightness bordering on abstraction.  

Coming from a wealthy background and educated at an exclusive boarding school followed by Yale, Reginald Marsh was perhaps an unlikely candidate to become the premier chronicler of the working class of Depression-era New York City. A taciturn man who was often uncomfortable in less-than-genteel surroundings, he overcame his feeling of being out of place through his rigorous sketching practice. Marsh visited his favorite haunts—including Harlem nightclubs, Bowery burlesque joints, and Coney Island—sometimes as often as three or four times a week, keeping meticulous records of the places he visited and the things he saw. This included hundreds of sketchbooks in which he made close observations of the everyday New Yorkers he saw around him, taking a particular interest in the era’s “new women,” a category which included shopgirls, burlesque performers, and other exemplars of freewheeling, sexually adventurous working-class culture.  

Marsh frequently rode the subway to his destinations, often sketching and even surreptitiously photographing riders to use as subjects for later paintings. He captures this young woman in just such a moment, as she relaxes with a newspaper, perhaps on her way to or from her job in a Midtown department store. Like his finished paintings, the drawing evokes the era’s freewheeling culture while also raising disquieting questions about power and urban surveillance, leading the viewer to wonder what this young woman would have thought of being the subject of one of Marsh’s works of art.

Born and raised in Rondout, New York, Jervis McEntee grew up in the shadow of the Catskill Mountains and overlooking the Hudson River, the two main subjects of his work as a painter. After an apprenticeship with Frederic Church, one of the leaders of the loosely-knit group of American landscape painters often known as the Hudson River School, McEntee took a space in the Tenth Street Studio Building, the movement’s unofficial headquarters. Once there, he quickly befriended the other occupants of the building—including Sanford Robinson Gifford, John Frederick Kensett, and Worthington Whittredge—with his courtly and kindly manner. Unlike these other figures, he struggled to support his family with his painting, perhaps because he preferred the quiet, bare landscapes of early winter to the glorious lushness of summer and autumn foliage that brought Church and others such fame. Long known by scholars for his extensive and erudite diary, McEntee has also recently seen increased appreciation for the subtle sensitivity of his vision.  

Though it depicts the same spare, wintry landscape as many of his compositions, the subject of an approaching train is an unusual one for McEntee. As the train emerges, wraithlike, from a thick stand of leafless trees (likely birches, one of McEntee’s favorite subjects) it approaches a lonely country depot populated by a handful of figures celebrated by the setting sun. McEntee, who suffered traumatically while serving in the Union Army during the Civil War, spent much of the 1860s wrestling with the aftermath of that conflict in his art. This enigmatic painting may reflect that ongoing struggle. The train, like the country, emerges from the harsh wilderness, making its way towards a small amount of humanity. At the same time, however, it moves away from fading light and into an uncertain darkness.  

Born in Rondout, New York, in the Catskills, Jervis McEntee grew up surrounding by the landscape he would devote his life to chronicling. After some early successes he quit his job at a feed and flour store in Rondout in order to devote his time to studying landscape painting, apprenticing himself to Frederic Edwin Church, then a rising star in the second generation of Hudson River School painters. In 1858 he secured a space in the prestigious Tenth Street Studio Building, alongside Church, John Kensett, and Sanford Robinson Gifford, all of whom he quickly befriended. A courtly and melancholy man, McEntee was a fixture of both life in the studio building and sketching trips up and down the Eastern states. He formed a particularly close bond with Gifford, and the two of them were frequently to be seen in the Catskills, on Mount Desert Island in Maine, and, later in their careers, in Europe.

McEntee, like many of his contemporaries, fell out of favor as artistic tastes changed in the later part of the nineteenth century. During his own time, however, he was respected not just for his kind and generous personality, but also for his unique landscape vision. While most of his contemporaries preferred to represent the lush hills and valleys of the Catskills, Adirondacks, and White Mountains in the height of summer or full resplendence of early autumn, McEntee was attracted the spare, subdued palette of late fall and winter. This painting is an exemplar of his precisely detailed early style, featuring a bare-branched birch tree—one of his favorite motifs—surrounded by the light gold of the late autumn grass. When he painted it in 1861 McEntee had just finished a brief but harrowing stint in the Union Army, and scholars have interpreted his works of this period as representing his desire to find peace and solitude far from the wrenching chaos of the front.

Born in Charleston to French immigrant parents, Louis Rémy Mignot traveled to The Hague to study art when he was 17 years old. In 1854, around when this painting was made, he moved to New York, where he established himself as part of the Hudson River School, a loosely affiliated group of landscape painters so named because of their frequent sketching trips in the great river’s valley. Mignot was something of a rarity in the group, which primarily comprised artists from old Northern Protestant families. The Catholic and Southern Mignot’s odd-man-out status was crystallized by the outbreak of the Civil War. Rather than stay in New York, which he found intolerable due to his Confederate sympathies, Mignot chose self-exile in London, where he spent the remainder of his life before he died prematurely of smallpox at the age of 39.  

Mignot’s best-known works stem from an 1857 trip he took with his fellow painter Frederic Edwin Church to Ecuador. While Church was drawn to the soaring majesty of the Andes, Mignot preferred the low-lying wetlands. Also in contrast to Church, who had a naturalist’s eye for sharply rendered detail, Mignot preferred to investigate the complex interplay among light, shadow, form, and color. Marshes turned out to be the ideal settings for such investigations, as they provided an ever-shifting palette of colors and shapes with which to experiment.   

The exact location of this scene is unclear. It has sometimes been speculated that it is the Pontine Marshes, a former wetland near Rome that was reclaimed for agriculture in the twentieth century. It is not clear, however, if Mignot ever went to Italy, and most of the European scenes in his oeuvre are from The Netherlands and Germany. More likely is somewhere near Lake George, in Upstate New York, where Mignot spent a significant portion of the summer of 1855, or somewhere near Charleston. In any case, Mignot has taken the opportunity to emphasize the rich orange and pink tones of twilight, one of his favorite times of day for its opportunities to explore rich yet subtle variations in color.  

American landscape painter Thomas Moran is best remembered today for his stunning, large-scale depictions of the splendors of the natural scenery of the American West, in particular of the area which would become Yellowstone National Park. Those paintings were executed in the 1870s, when he was attached to United States Geological Survey expeditions surveying the trans-Mississippi West. The land and sea of the Eastern Seaboard were equally important inspirations for the artist, however, who was excited by the possibilities of these smaller-scale locales. He and his wife Mary Nimmo Moran—an accomplished painter and etcher herself—split their time among East Hampton, on Long Island; Newark, New Jersey; Manhattan; Philadelphia; and traveling up and down the East Coast and in Europe.

This seascape dates from that period in his career, and likely depicts the view from Long Island or the New Jersey coast under the light of a full moon. Thomas and Mary Nimmo Moran spent much of their time sketching out-of-doors, investigating the changes in light and air they witnessed in the coastal waterways of the mid-Atlantic. Though his wife frequently executed etchings and other finished works directly on the scene, Thomas came of artistic age during a more conservative artistic era and preferred to finish his compositions in the studio. This painting demonstrates his devotion to close observation of even the most fleeting of atmospheric effects, as he traces the silvery threads of light reflected off the sea and clouds from the luminous moon which hangs low in the sky.

Moran traveled to Mexico in 1883, where he produced a number of images of the Trojes Mine, which produced copper, silver, and gold, among other metals and minerals. He again visited the country in 1903 in the company of his daughter Ruth (who became his companion after the death of Mary Nimmo in 1899). He likely made the sketches for this painting during that trip. It is one of several he produced of Tula, the capital of the Toltec state and society which flourished in Central Mexico in the 10th through 12th centuries. Moran had previously depicted the cliff dwellings of the Pueblos of the American Southwest; thus, his depictions of Tula represent an outgrowth of his interest in Indigenous American architecture and how it interacts with the landscape. 

In contrast with some of his more dramatic depictions of Western United States and Mexican scenery, Moran’s representation of Tula in this painting is picturesque, even pastoral in nature. The ancient ruins nestle in among a lush landscape in a way that is indebted to Claude Lorraine and other seventeenth-century popularizers of the classical landscape tradition. A stand of trees—known as a repoussoir—frames and contains the scene, helping to draw the viewer’s eye to the center. The lush greenery of the middle ground plays host to a group of picnicking tourists, emphasizing the site’s suitability for the kind of pleasurable travel Americans would become known for worldwide in the twentieth century. 

George L.K. Morris—along with Albert Eugene Gallatin, Suzy Frelinghuysen, and Charles G. Shaw—formed part of a group called the Park Avenue Cubists. This mildly pejorative name, given to denote the quartet’s wealthy and patrician backgrounds (Morris counted as an ancestor a signer of the Declaration of Independence), but belied the seriousness with which they took painting, in particular abstract art. Morris was a co-founder and champion of the American Abstract Artists, a loosely affiliated growth founded in 1936 to advocate in favor of abstract art during an era when the American art world was dominated by Regionalism and other figurative styles. In his painting as well as his public advocacy, Morris was a staunch supporter of a hard-edged cubism derived from that of Fernand Léger, with whom he had studied in Paris. A prominent figure in the New York art world of the 1930s and early 1940s, he and his colleagues’ cubist-derived abstraction was overshadowed by the rise of the Abstract Expressionists after World War II. 

This painting dates from an interesting moment in Morris’s career. Like other leftists associated with the Popular Front, Morris considered the threat of Nazi Germany to be sufficiently urgent that he abandoned his suspicion of the military. Endeavoring to receive an appointment as a combat artist or artist-correspondent, the painter abandoned his customary complete abstraction in order to execute a series of works explicitly depicting military subjects. Morris had no military experience, instead basing these works on newspaper reports of combat. Though his attempt to join the war effort was unsuccessful, Precision Bombing is an interesting combination of his cubist abstraction with the needs of wartime representation. Particularly notable are the red sections, highlighted with the sort of numbering which would have appeared on airplane fuselages. The work’s combination of fractured picture plane and orderly grid likewise evokes the simultaneous disorder and regimentation of combat. 

Anna Mary Robinson Moses was introduced to art by her father, who encouraged her to paint landscapes using homemade pigments made of grapes and other simple ingredients. Later calling these childhood productions “lambscapes,” she set them aside to focus on her life as a wife and mother on a series of dairy farms she managed with her husband Thomas, first in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and later in their native Upstate New York. She returned to painting in her later years, in particular after her husband’s death in 1927. She chose painting in part because she was frustrated that her needlepoint and other textile art was frequently destroyed by moths, which also explains her preference for Masonite—a kind of hard-pressed cardboard—over canvas. She was content to remain more-or-less a hobbyist until Louis J. Caldor, a collector and dealer, happened upon her work hanging in a local drugstore. Several exhibitions in New York City followed, though it was the decision by Gimbel’s Department Store to feature her art—along with breads, cakes, and strawberry preserves she made—as part of its 1941 Thanksgiving festival that catapulted her to national prominence.

Moses, still spry and sharp-minded until her death at 101 in 1961, became a celebrity as much for her direct, homespun personality as for her paintings, which depicted the rural communities of Virginia, New York, and Vermont which she knew best. Now known as a “memory painter”—a term she seems to have coined—her work was popular in her time as an antidote to the anxieties of first the Great Depression and World War II and later the Cold War. Championed by such figures as Harry S Truman and John F. Kennedy, she was also frequently lauded as an antidote to the supposedly obscure modernism of Abstract Expressionism, which Truman referred to as “ham and eggs art.” A savvy marketing strategy saw her work reproduced on curtains, plates, and, most famously, greeting cards, cementing her popularity in broader American culture, if not the world of high art.

Born in England, Eadweard Muybridge first came to prominence as a landscape photographer in San Francisco in the years immediately following the U.S. Civil War. His local renown led him to the employ of Leland Stanford, former Governor, future Senator, and then the head of the Central Pacific Railroad. Stanford was passionate about racehorses and wished to know everything he could about the way they move, including whether all four legs lift off the ground when the animals are at a full run. Muybridge spent several years—and a great deal of Stanford’s money—in developing advances in chemistry and camera technology in order to answer the question. The answer, it turns out, is that they do.

The relationship between Stanford and Muybridge, as with many business partnerships, eventually soured. The horse farm where Muybridge conducted his experiments would go on to become Stanford University, named after Leland Stanford’s son, Leland Jr., who died of typhoid just after his sixteenth birthday. Muybridge sought out a new source of support, finding it at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. While there he worked with a variety of artistic and scientific collaborators, including the famed realist painter and teacher Thomas Eakins. The result of his work was Animal Locomotion, a massive publication that included 781 collotype plates constructed out of over 20,000 individual images. In the series, Muybridge investigated the movements of a wide variety of nude and clothed men and women as well as animals including elephants, baboons, and cockatiels, among others. The book was a sensation, and it is now often regarded as a key technological and conceptual milestone in the early history of cinema.

Louise Nevelson was one of the most influential and prolific sculptors of the twentieth century, renowned for her complex assemblages of found wood painted monochrome black, though she did not gain widespread renown until 1959, when she was already sixty years old. Nevelson immigrated with her family from Ukraine when she was young, part of a wave of Russian Jews escaping pogroms in the Russian Empire. Her family settled in Maine, where her father established himself as a lumber dealer and contractor. Later in her life Nevelson would remark that her father’s job, as well as her feeling of deep connection with the Maine forests, informed her lifelong interest in wood. Shortly after she graduated from high school, Nevelson married Charles Nevelson, a well-off businessman from New York City. Though initially excited by the prospect of living in the city, she eventually found that married life interfered with her desire to be an artist, and she separated from her husband in 1931.

This drawing dates from the formative years of the 1930s, when she took several trips to Europe, including to Munich to study with the famed teacher Hans Hofmann, with whom she also studied at the Art Students League after he moved to New York in 1932. During this time of experimentation Nevelson showed interest in drawing, painting, and sculpture, incorporating influences from a variety of sources, including Fauvism, Cubism, Mexican murals (she worked as an assistant to Diego Rivera), African, and Mesoamerican art. Drawings of nude women were one of her most common subjects. The angular, monumental faces and robust musculature of the two women in this drawing are typical for her work of this era, and speak to the blended influence of Matisse, Picasso, and Rivera on her work.

Born in Boston to a family of sailors and ship owners and growing up on the ocean William Edward Norton had a lifelong interest in and focus on marine paintings. Early in his career he gained prominence for his ship portraits, executed in a relatively stiff and formal style. Studying under landscape painter George Inness, however, prompted Norton to open up stylistically, adopting the looser paint application of his mature career. In the 1870s he spent time in Paris, where he studied with Louis Jacquesson de la Chevreuse and Antoine Vollon. Though he was there during the heyday of Impressionism, he rejected the style in favor of a more academic one, feeling that the newer painters lacked an important element of finish. For the rest of his career, he retained this preference for a more conservative style, avoiding the formal experimentation of modernism.  

Norton lived in London from around 1875 to 1901, when he moved to New York. During his time in New York, he spent summers in Maine, usually on Monhegan Island. This painting is a relatively less common American subject, from just around the time he left England. It depicts a seaside scene—likely a harbor based on the small spit of land that emerges from the left of the composition as well as the calm placidity of the water and the moored boats. The exact location is unknown, though it could have been any of the popular seaside destinations of the Eastern Seaboard. Norton’s work was popular among the industrial and professional classes, who appreciated his calm, pleasant depictions of the vacation destinations to which they flocked in increasing numbers at the turn of the twentieth century.  

George Loftus Noyes was part of the first generation of Americans to absorb the techniques and precepts of French Impressionism, to which he was exposed while studying at the progressive Académie Colarossi in Paris in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Returning to the United States, he established himself as a foremost figure in the group of loosely affiliated painters known as the Boston School, interrupted by a three-year stint as a professor at Stanford University in California. By the 1920s—when this work was painted—he had begun to incorporate some of the features of Postimpressionist painting into his work, including the closely stippled dots of pointillism and the bright colors of Fauvism. Traveling widely, he exhibited a large number of landscapes and still lifes of scenes in New England, Europe, North Africa, and the Levant.

This still life is relatively atypical for the artist, and features a variety of religious artifacts, including a painting reminiscent of the early Renaissance, a rosary, a carved wood angel candle holder (also recalling the early fifteenth century), and a chalice, as well as a blue-and-gold vase containing cut cherry or plum blossoms. The vase and fruit branches show the influence of Japanese art on Noyes and other Impressionists, largely transmitted by the ukiyo-e woodblock prints that became popular collectors’ items in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the painting, Noyes uses the aesthetic language of Impressionism and related movements to render this series of objects referencing Catholic piety. Noyes’s reasons for selecting these precise objects are unknown, though they may indicate a fondness for the perceived simplicity of the Tuscan peasantry he undoubtedly encountered on his trips there.

Richard Henry Park was working as a dry goods clerk in New York City when he saw Hiram Powers’ celebrated sculpture The Greek Slave, an experience which caused him a profound epiphany, inspiring him to become a sculptor. He first apprenticed himself to a marble cutter before attracting the notice of Erastus Dow Palmer, one of the best known American Neoclassical sculptors. Under Palmer’s tutelage Park would join the ranks of the foremost American sculptors in this style, executing a number of public commissions as well as brisk private sales, primarily of idealized busts such as this one.

This bust is typical of Park’s style, which adopted the pure white marble and idealized depictions popularized by contemporaries like Powers and Palmer. It dates from his time in Florence, where he moved in 1872. Florence was a center for American expatriate sculptors because of its proximity to both marble quarries and skilled carvers, though it fell increasingly out of favor at the end of the nineteenth century as Americans began to favor more naturalistic bronze sculpture as practiced in Paris. Park was able to adapt to this changing taste, moving to Chicago in advance of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, doing a lively business in bronze portrait sculpture there.

James Peale was the fifth and youngest child of Charles Peale, a member of the British gentry who had been banished to America after a conviction for forgery (the crime was then a capital offense, so his banishment represents leniency of a sort). In Maryland he found work as a schoolteacher, and after his untimely death his widow and children ended up in Annapolis. There, James was apprenticed to his younger brother Charles Willson, who was working as a saddle maker. When that business failed James was again apprenticed, this time to a local cabinetmaker and carpenter. In 1769 Charles Willson returned from England, where he had studied under renowned Anglo-American painter Benjamin West. James joined his brother in his studio, where he served as frame maker and studio assistant while receiving instruction as an artist. After both brothers served in the Continental Army they ended up in Philadelphia, where they established themselves as portrait painters in both oil and miniature. Charles Willson became one of the leading artists of the young republic, gaining particular renown for his Peale Museum, which blended art and natural history exhibits.  

James—who specialized in miniature painting—has often been overshadowed by his dynamic older brother. Recent scholarship, however, has begun to explore his legacy as an artist, which includes his training of his three daughters as painters. These portraits, of a prosperous Philadelphia businessman and his wife, show the influence of Peale’s daughter Sarah Miriam, who had followed in her father’s footsteps as a portraitist and sometimes helped him in his studio. She favored lighter fabrics and delicate embroidery, both of which are particularly evident in the depiction of Josephine Lapsley. The portraits also show the strong influence of the French Neoclassical style that was in vogue in the first decade of the nineteenth century, particularly the sculptural detail which frames Josephine.  

Rembrandt Peale was a member of the famous Peale family, the second son of Charles Willson Peale and the nephew of James Peale. Rembrandt—like his older brother Raphaelle—was trained by his father to be an artist from a young age. At the age of 17 his father secured for him a portrait sitting with George Washington, who was then serving as the first President of the United States. Later in his life, Rembrandt would brand himself the last living painter of Washington. In addition to studying under his father, Rembrandt studied first in London and then in Paris, which allowed him to absorb the two prevailing portrait styles of the day. While most painters of his era, including such luminaries as Gilbert Stuart, John Vanderlyn, and John Trumbull, chose to specialize in either the English Grand Manner or French neoclassical style, Rembrandt brought a mix of both styles to his portraits, as well as to his grand history paintings.  

This portrait dates from the time when he was studying in Paris (he was there in 1808 and again 1809-1810) and shows the increasing influence of the French style on his painting. The three children—their identities unfortunately unknown—are represented with an anatomical fidelity and precise brushwork that stands in contrast to the freer and bolder execution of the English school. While Rembrandt shows a facility with texture (of skin and hair as well as fabric) borne of long hours practicing in the studio, his representation of surface is not allowed to disrupt the composition’s thematic and structural unity. The way the arm of the oldest sitter wraps around the body of the youngest, in particular, shows Rembrandt’s mastery of the French style’s emphasis on corporeal three dimensionality. 

Born in Philadelphia, Joseph Pennell was descended from some of the state’s earliest Quaker settlers. He studied briefly at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, but artistic and personal clashes with Thomas Eakins led him to drop out. He quickly established himself as a professional illustrator for a variety of publications. An 1884 move to London, just after his marriage, put him in a multinational artistic and literary circle that included Robert Louis Stevenson, George Bernard Shaw, and James Whistler. Pennell had already distinguished himself as a printmaker in Philadelphia, and his contact with Whistler helped him continue to hone his abilities as an etcher and lithographer. Pennell—like Whistler—particularly specialized in urban scenes, often highlighting the contrast between industrial modernity and traditional life and architecture in the Victorian city.

This print is a perfect example. In the background, the stately English Baroque dome of Christopher Wren’s cathedral (only two blocks away) looms over the city, partially dissolving into the smoky haze—or perhaps rainy fog—of modern London. In the foreground a quartet of barges sit beached on the banks of the Thames, surrounded by a handful of idle workers. The architecture is a mix of functional and historical, dominated by a warehouse dotted with the names of various merchants and other concerns. A pedestrian bridge juts out into the river at left. Overall, the effect is one not so much of frenetic commercial activity as it is a contemplative glance at the changing state of Victorian London.

John Frederick Peto began painting still lifes during his enrollment at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1877. He was esteemed for his wide variety of still life subjects and masterful usage of light and shadow to create three-dimensional optical illusions, a technique known as trompe de l’oeil. After moving with his wife from Philadelphia to the small community of Island Heights, New Jersey in 1889, Peto painted smaller scale works to sell to locals and tourists.  

This still life is dated 1890, the year after his move, which explains its small size and intimate, simple composition. Nonetheless, this work is characteristic of Peto’s practice with its use of a close-up perspective and decisive lighting that shapes the forms of the presented cheese, oranges, and nuts. 

Born in Vermont, William Lamb Picknell was raised in Boston by an uncle after his father’s untimely death. After studying with a local artist named George Loring Brown, Picknell went to Europe, first to study with George Inness in Rome and then to enroll in the École des Beaux-Arts, studying with Jean-Léon Gérôme. In the summers, he spent time in Brittany, where other American artists including Robert Wylie and Thomas Hovendon also gathered. This set of influences—both artistic and locational—resulted in Picknell developing an interest in atmospheric effects, especially that of bright, even glaring light. In 1880, one of his Breton scenes, Roue de Concarneau (1880, National Gallery of Art, Washington) earned him Honorable Mention at the Paris Salon, the first American to receive such an honor.  

In 1882 Picknell moved to Cape Ann, on the coast of Massachusetts, until sometime in the late 1880s or early 1890s, when he got married and returned to France, splitting his time between Moret-sur-Loing, outside Paris, and Antibes, on the Côte d'Azur. This painting is likely one of his last American scenes, executed in or around Annisquam, Massachusetts. Painted en plein air (out-of-doors), it displays his characteristic interest in the quality of almost painfully bright sunlight, which illuminates the meadow’s foliage while glinting off the lake or pond in the distance. Picknell returned to the United States in 1897 while suffering failing health, dying in Marblehead, Massachusetts later that year.  

Hiram Powers, who was born in Vermont but spent the majority of his artistic career in Florence, Italy, was the most famous American sculptor of his day. He caused a sensation with his 1843 sculpture The Greek Slave, which used references to ancient sculpture to depict a fictional incident from the Greek Revolution (1821-1830). After this early success Powers settled into his elder statesman status, entertaining illustrious visitors from England, the United States, and Europe in his studio, many of whom sat for commissioned portrait busts by the artist. He also completed a number of idealized portrait busts, which were informed by his beliefs as an adherent of the Swedenborgian faith or New Church, as well as more general nineteenth century notions of purity and spiritual harmony.

This bust, Faith, is one of Powers’ later works, and belongs to a series that also included idealized depictions of Hope and Charity. The series was the idea of Marshall Woods, a scholar and art connoisseur who was one of Powers’ major patrons. The sculpture, of which at least 14 copies were made, is emblematic of a number of the innovations Powers made in the realm of Neoclassical sculpture. Like his other idealized works, it was available as part of a kind of catalogue of sculptures and was executed by specially trained workmen under Powers’ supervision, using tools that he had specially designed to achieve the smooth, velvety texture for which he was known. Powers sought only the purest white marble, and his surviving correspondence is full of references to his willingness to discard sculptures which did not meet this standard, as well as his exacting instructions for cleaning, maintenance, and display of his work. This version came to Rollins from his grandson Hiram Powers II, who was the Chair of Romance Languages from 1911 to 1917.

Born in Florence to expatriate American parents, John Singer Sargent spent his childhood drifting around Europe. Largely educated by his father, he decided to study art and, at the age of 18, ended up in Paris, where he enrolled at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Simultaneously, he supplemented the Académie’s rigorous curriculum with private study in the atelier of portraitist Carolus-Duran. By rejecting the established teaching of Alexandre Cabanel and Jean-Léon Gérôme in favor of the younger and less established Carolus-Duran, Sargent was casting his lot with a new, more progressive style of portraiture that emphasized brushy immediacy rather than the smoothness that characterized the work of the older masters. Quickly outpacing his teacher, Sargent would by the 1890s establish himself as the most sought-after portraitist in Anglo-American society, coveted for the modernity of his style and his ability to capture a sitters' emotional essence.  

This portrait depicts a friend and fellow artist with whom Sargent traveled to the Netherlands in 1880. They went to Haarlem, site of the Frans Hals Museum, to copy works by the Golden Age portraitist, a favorite of Carolus-Duran and his students. Hals had been neglected by previous generations due to his loose, painterly brushwork, which was considered to give his works an undesirable “unfinished” quality. It was just this looseness which attracted the newer generation, and it became quite common for young painters to make the pilgrimage to Haarlem. In addition to its painterly quality and the frank, head-on depiction, this portrait demonstrates other attributes which would become hallmarks of Sargent’s practice as a painter. The first was his use of friends and family as subjects. The second was his practice of painting portraits en plein air. Most commonly associated with Impressionist landscapes, en plein air (meaning out of doors) allowed Sargent to make use of natural light and scenery to enhance the casual elegance of his portraits.  

This undated oil sketch, which depicts several figures clustered around a dead or wounded man in the aftermath of a Civil War battle, was made by Julian Scott, who lied about his age to enlist as a musician in the Union Army at the outset of the war in 1861. Early in the war Scott saved the lives of nine of his wounded fellows at great risk to his own life, for which he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Wounded in a later battle, he spent several months convalescing in a hospital on Long Island, after which he returned to service as a military artist. After the war he moved to New York City, where he studied with Emanuel Leutze, the foremost American history painter of the day. Elected an associate of the National Academy of Design in 1870, he became known for his scenes of the Civil War that focused on the experiences of everyday soldiers rather than the generals and other august personages favored by most painters of the war.

This sketch, likely executed in preparation for an unidentified picture, demonstrates his focus on the common soldier. The perspective is low to the ground, urging the viewer to identify with the soldiers, who work to move their compatriot onto a wagon. One of them gestures to a figure deeper in the woods, perhaps a surgeon, suggesting that the slumped figure at the center of the composition is in urgent need of medical care. The brownish tones of the soldiers’ uniforms blend into the muddy ground, emphasizing the dirty, brutal nature of the conflict, in which swampy mud played a constant role. As the taste for battle scenes waned later in the nineteenth century Scott took up other work, most notably traveling to Oklahoma and Arizona to take part in the 1890 Indian Census, making drawings and other records of life in the Southwest.

Born in 1833, William Trost Richards was an exemplar of the second generation of Hudson River School painters, influenced by the English art theorist John Ruskin and the American painter Asher Brown Durand to prioritize the close study of nature in his paintings. Traveling frequently in both the United States and Europe, he became one of the best-known and -respected painters in the country during the 1860s. During the 1870s and 1880s, as American taste began to favor the less strictly naturalistic landscapes of painters like James Whistler and George Inness, Richards worried about being an “old fogey” whom time had passed by. Luckily, collectors still valued his watercolors, in particular his seascapes, and he continued to work in the same precisely observed manner which had brought him early renown.

Buoyed by the success of the watercolors, in the 1880s and 1890s he increasingly painted seascapes, attracted by the atmospheric qualities of light and air as well as the often-violent meetings of land and water. He even had special boxes constructed to protect his oil sketches from the surf and rain, so dedicated was he to painting directly from nature. This sketch, which dates from this period and may have been preparatory to one of his finished seascapes, is exemplary of his work of the 1880s. Richards captures the towering, fluffy white clouds as they blend almost imperceptibly to the sea on the horizon, and similarly renders the gentle waves as they dissipate on the shore. The overall effect is one of both harmonious composition and sensory immediacy.

This small, deceptively simple painting is the work of one of the most celebrated—and enigmatic—American painters. Born in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1847, Albert Pinkham Ryder would come to be one of the familiar figures of the burgeoning bohemian art scene of New York City’s Greenwich Village around the turn of the twentieth century. A noted eccentric, Ryder was known for his outlandish lifestyle as well as his deeply personal, poetic paintings (many of which were painted on the wooden lids of cigar boxes), which he often reworked obsessively over periods of years. This painting likely dates from his early career, possibly even before he left New Bedford for New York, having settled there with his parents by 1870. His early works display an interest in livestock, and this painting’s loose brushstroke and luminous gold quality indicate the possible influence of the French Barbizon school, as well as the artist’s future association with the movement known as Tonalism. In contrast with the highly detailed, large-scale, and bombastic style favored by fellow New Bedford native Albert Bierstadt and other landscape painters of an earlier generation, Ryder and other Tonalists preferred smaller, hazier pictures that sought to express inner spiritual truths rather than grand themes.

In his later works Ryder incorporated literary references, in particular to William Shakespeare and Edgar Allen Poe. He also darkened his compositions, building huge masses of paint and varnish layered atop one another. This tendency to paint over sections of his works before they were dried, as well as an occasional use of non-artistic material like wax and cooking oil, have lent his work its reputation for instability. The surfaces of late paintings are often warped, cracked, and bubbled, and many have lost the characteristic gold luminosity that was so admired by his colleagues. This early work has thankfully avoided that fate, but the intense craquelure in the gold sky, as well as the textured appearance of the surface, hint at these future evolutions of his style.

Silva, the son of an immigrant barber, tried out several professions before apprenticing with a sign painter in the 1850s. Just before the outbreak of the Civil War he enlisted in the New York State militia, quickly rising to the rank of captain. While camped just outside Washington, D.C. he became ill, likely with malaria, which sidelined him for most of the rest of the war. In 1865 he was stationed at an Army hospital in Lynn, Massachusetts, just north of Boston, which was likely his first introduction to the New England coastal scenery which makes up a large part of his oeuvre. Scholars have traditionally assumed that Silva was self-taught, but analyses of his early works show a high level of artistic development that makes that unlikely. He may have studied a time with Sanford Robinson Gifford, a slightly older painter who served in the same regiment.

This work is typical of Silva’s production in the late 1870s, when he was transitioning from a hard-edged, crystalline, and very still manner of painting to one with a greater variety of formal and compositional elements, in particular a wider range of color and warmer tone. Large singular rocks, like the one to the right in this composition, were a steady feature of his work in this era and may reflect his—and the country’s—experience in the Civil War. These rocks, which are steadfast survivors of long geologic ages, stand in noted contrast to the more temporary human activity in the rest of the painting. The nighttime setting has given Silva the opportunity to experiment with his use of color. The orange orb of the moon throws off evocative washes of pinkish red which gradually subside to darker greyish blue, and reflections on the water illuminate the mysterious nocturnal activities of boats on the water.

One of the most well-known and prolific artists in the group sometimes called the Ashcan School for their gritty, unembellished views of everyday life in New York City, John Sloan had a successful career as a newspaper illustrator in Philadelphia before relocating to New York in 1904, following Robert Henri, the widely acknowledged leader of the group. Upon arriving, he and his wife Dolly took an apartment in a working-class building downtown, far from the refined centers of the artistic establishment, most of which—like the National Academy of Design and Metropolitan Museum of Art—were located uptown. Spending hours at a time wandering the streets, Sloan began to conceive of a series of etchings, called New York City Life, that chronicled daily life in the city.

Though later entries in the series, including "The Women’s Page," also part of the RMA collection, would increasingly focus on working class life, Sloan chose for this first entry in the series a relatively genteel subject. With their formal clothing and exaggerated physiques, Sloan gently but pointedly critiques just the sorts of patrons he might have been expected to cultivate, establishing not just his physical but also his social and political distance from the denizens of the Metropolitan Museum. Sloan, a lifelong leftist, would go on to join the Socialist Party in 1910, becoming the art editor of influential socialist magazine The Masses in 1912. He continued to rely on illustration work to pay his bills well into the 1920s, and that work reflected his ongoing interest in printmaking.

Described by Sloan as “one of the most popular of my etchings,” this print depicts Sloan (with the pipe, at right), his friend and mentor Robert Henri, and their wives, Dolly and Linda, respectively. Linda reads aloud while the two artists draw, and Dolly looks out at the viewer, drawing them in. The print has often been seen as a paean to cozy friendship and domesticity, with the four friends enjoying a comfortable rapport. Yet the circumstances of its production also hint at a darker meaning. Sloan made the print after Linda Henri’s untimely death at age 30 after years of ill health and may have intended it as a comfort to his friend. Dolly Sloan herself suffered from tuberculosis, and the delicate whiteness of both women’s features perhaps suggests the disaster to come. The four figures seem isolated in their togetherness, with each focusing on their own activity and ignoring the others, lending a melancholy cast to the otherwise warm scene.

Sloan generally worked efficiently as a printmaker, quickly moving from conception of a scene to the completed print. One exception was this one, which he worked on fitfully from 1906 to 1910, only completing it after her death. In the affectionate portrait Sloan’s mother Henrietta sits comfortably in an armchair, regarding the viewer with a strong yet quizzical expression. Accompanied by a small dog, she is surrounded by indications of her illness, including the cane, blanket, and fan in her lap and the several glasses on the small table beside her. A relative rarity for the generally outwardly focused Sloan, this print was composed mostly from memory and photographs, rather than in person. Sloan seems to have felt his absence from Philadelphia acutely, though he and his mother kept up a lively correspondence.

Thomas Anshutz, Sloan’s teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, died in 1912 and Sloan created this etching to honor his memory. Anshutz stands on the stage with a skeleton and an almost-nude model, demonstrating the ways in which the skeletal system informs the structure of the human body for Robert Henri’s Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts class. The study of anatomy, in particular from nude models as well as cadavers, was a cornerstone of artistic education, and Sloan represents the packed gallery as rapt with attention on the legendary teacher, who himself was a pupil of Thomas Eakins. The audience includes John and Dolly Sloan, Robert and Linda Henri, and fellow artists Walter Pach, William Glackens, Maurice Prendergast, and George Bellows. By including these figures—all of whom were key members (or married to key members) of The Eight—in the picture Sloan emphasizes his view of Anschutz’s importance to that group of American modernist artists and their uncompromising brand of urban realism.

One of Sloan’s seminal New York City Life etchings, this print was generally reviled by critics when first exhibited. Complaining about the supposedly unsightly body of the working-class woman, as well as the cramped room (her stockings, hung to dry in the window, drew particular ire) and the antics of the boy and the cat, reviewers professed themselves shocked by Sloan’s lack of middle-class taste and propriety. More recently, scholars have lauded the print for its evocation of warm hominess and unpretentious assertion of the dignity of working-class life. The boy and cat—undisciplined and uncouth to prim viewers in 1905—seem to be having quite a bit of fun, and the woman’s enjoyment of the newspaper—a democratic form of knowledge dissemination as well as Sloan’s primary source of income at the time—seems to be a rare respite from the hardships of day-to-day tenement life.

The Womens’ Page is also a master class in the medium of etching. Sloan builds the room, its furnishings, and the figures’ clothing from a riot of densely packed yet orderly crosshatchings, with the woman and child as oases of almost pure negative space. He expertly manipulates the density of his lines as well as their individual thicknesses to create areas of shadow and contrast, as in the woman’s stockings, which are framed by the light streaming in from the open window.

In her non-objective paintings, Esphyr Slobodkina interrogates geometric form with a keen attention to color. These paintings, and the work of her abstract contemporaries, contributed to a watershed moment in the history of art of the States. Slobodkina was ardently committed to the promotion of abstract art in the United States. She was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists collective and served as the group’s president from 1963 to 1965.

While this two-dimensional painting, Desert Moon, is composed of flat forms, certain geometric shapes elicit a sculptural feel. Moreover, the artist overlaps particular elements across the picture plane, suggesting collage techniques. The darker colors in the painting, mostly muted grays and blues, are accentuated by a pop of coral. Noticeably, the brown strip on the left almost frames that side of the composition.

This stunning view was painted by the American painter James David Smillie, and depicts the Bay of Naples, in Southern Italy. Smillie was the son of James Smillie, perhaps the most in-demand practitioner of steel line engraving in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, and was trained to follow in his father’s footsteps. Though he made a comfortable living as an engraver, mostly of bank notes, he found the work tedious and dull, and decided in 1864 to teach himself to draw from life and paint in oils. This painting, executed near the end of his career, demonstrates his success in doing so.

One of seven children, James D. Smillie was particularly close with his younger brother George, with whom he frequently traveled. The two often worked together on the same canvases, and their paintings from before 1880 (when James D. became engage to his future wife) usually share subjects. This painting is likely based on sketches made during a rare trip without his brother, when James D. and his wife traveled to Europe for his health. Naples had long been a destination for artists, especially since the re-discovery in the late eighteenth century of the ruins of the Roman towns of Herculaneum and Pompeii, which were destroyed by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius (smoldering in the background of this picture) in 79 A.D. Vesuvius remains seismically active, and frequently erupted in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, providing fodder for generations of artists. This picture shows Smillie’s mastery of the Hudson River School landscape style, though by 1904 it would have been considered notably old-fashioned. That same year he wrote in his diary that “I do not know what good art is according to present standards.”

Henry Pember Smith traveled widely along the East Coast of the United States and Europe, shaping a prolific career as a painter of coastline scenes in England, Connecticut, and Italy, among other locales. Little is known about his training or early life, but he seems to have exhibited regularly at the National Academy of Design, the American Watercolor Society, and other prominent arts institutions of his day. This oil painting depicts a tranquil spring morning along one of Venice’s picturesque canals. A church or palazzo is illuminated by the warm light of early day, and the tranquility of the water is interrupted only by a pair of the city’s signature gondolas. Smith was noted by his contemporaries for his blending of sharp depictions of architecture. His attention to detail in this and similar pictures would likely have appealed to the Americans who were traveling to Europe in increasing numbers, many of whom were eager purchasers of paintings that could serve as mementos of their travels.

Sonntag was born in Pittsburg and raised in Cincinnati, becoming known as one of the latter city’s foremost painters during the 1850s. In 1855-6 he and his wife spent a year living in Florence, in Tuscany, where he studied Italian art and landscape, a common practice for American painters during the nineteenth century. After returning from Florence they settled in New York City, where Sonntag remained a fixture in the art scene until his death in 1900. This painting dates from 1860, the year he was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design, and is a copy of a larger painting now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Sonntag was best known for his site-specific depictions of American scenery, in particular the mountainous areas of Southern Ohio, West Virginia, and Maryland. This work, however, does not depict a known place, but rather an idealized view that brings together ruins from a number of different eras, all unified by the path that gently winds through the scene and the golden, hazy quality of the light. Though some American artists of this period painted specific Italian scenes, this sort of idealized view was quite popular, largely due to the influence of Thomas Cole, the Anglo-American landscape painter who is widely considered the progenitor of the American landscape. Even more than Cole, Sonntag was likely influenced by Claude Lorrain, the seventeenth-century French landscapist whose depiction of arcadian Italian ruins spurred a great deal of Italian travel by tourists and artists alike.

Coming from a prominent artistic family outside Philadelphia, Mary Russell Smith was during her brief life one of America’s foremost painters of animals, in particular chickens. Trained by her mother—an accomplished flower painter—and accompanying her parents and older siblings on sketching trips to Europe as a child, Smith made her first oil painting at age 14, keeping meticulous inventories of the over 300 works she completed between then and her death of typhoid fever at age 36. She also raised chickens as a hobby, and her close observation of these animals—as well as creatures she watched in the woods near the family home—led to a reputation as a particularly adept painter of the textures of fur and feathers.

Small, often humorous scenes of animals—frequently depicted in a sentimental or otherwise anthropomorphized manner—were very popular in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century, and Smith looked to contemporaries like Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait and Sir Edwin Landseer for inspiration, the latter of whom was generally acknowledged as the best living painter of animal subjects. It is from Landseer that she likely inherited her penchant for dramatic, even violent scenes such as this one. For her middle-class Victorian buyers, this depiction of the dramatic moment when a weasel has just killed two baby chicks likely operated on multiple levels. The death of the young chickens would have evoked sentimental, protective feelings at this disruption of the orderly nuclear family by an outsider, but her obvious skill in composition and detail would have earned their admiration.

Born in Nebraska, Robert Spencer ended up in New York by 1899, studying first at the National Academy of Design and then at the New York School of Art, which was run first by William Merritt Chase and then by Robert Henri. In 1910 he moved to New Hope, Pennsylvania, becoming an important member of the artists’ colony centered in that region. Very few paintings survive from before that time, likely because Spencer destroyed his earlier student work in order to focus the attention of collectors on his later production. This work dates from a period of transition in his career, when he had left New York but still considered himself a student while he lived and worked along the Delaware River in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey.  

According to a label on the back of the painting, Spencer painted this work in Point Pleasant, a small unincorporated community along the Delaware in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Stylistically, it bears many of the hallmarks of Spencer’s student days, in particular its tightly controlled brushwork. By contrast, after 1910 he began to handle his paint in a looser and freer fashion. It shares with those later works, however, an interest in quotidian subjects, especially worn-down and even unsightly manmade structures. Rather than the majestic course of the Delaware, for example, or even the picturesque white-clad houses of the small town, Spencer chooses a retaining wall to dominate the fore- and middle-grounds of his composition. Further evidence of his evolving style comes from the palette, which he restricts to a relatively small range of grays, greens, and blues.  

Born in Luxembourg, Edward Steichen spent his childhood in Milwaukee, first experimenting with photography while apprenticing in a commercial lithography studio. He made the acquaintance of fellow Midwesterner and pioneering art photographer Clarence H. White, who recommended Steichen stop in to see the gallerist and photographer Alfred Stieglitz on his way to Paris to study painting at the Académie Julian. Steichen did so, quickly becoming Stieglitz’s primary protégé in the burgeoning movement to turn photography into art. Steichen abandoned his studies of painting soon after arriving in Paris, instead immersing himself in the city’s avant-garde art and photography scenes. By 1902, when he returned to the United States at the age of 23, he had already established the particular ability and expertise as a portraitist of artists, members of high society, and other celebrities that would sustain his later fame as a portrait and fashion photographer for Vanity Fair.

Steichen’s portrait of White—published in Stieglitz’s influential journal Camera Work in 1905—shows his mastery of the Pictorialist style of photography. Pictorialism, which was influenced by French Symbolism and Tonalism, its American equivalent, sought to establish photography—previously seen mostly as a scientific tool and means to inexpensive portraiture—as an art form. Steichen and other Pictorialists used the new gum bichromate process and wide-open apertures to create soft, painterly effects that downplayed photography’s supposed objectivity in favor of the realm of subjective emotional experience. White’s pose, with chin resting in hand, his hair falling loosely over dreamily intense eyes, as well as the way in which his dark clothing blends almost imperceptibly into his environment, are all hallmarks of Pictorialism. Steichen’s manipulation of the photograph to highlight his fellow artist’s hand and head, meanwhile, make clear the importance of both manual dexterity and intellectual force to White’s status as an artist.

Alfred Stieglitz was one of the most influential figures in the development of both photography and modern art in the United States. He first took up photography while studying in Berlin in the 1880s. Upon returning to the United States, he became a key figure in the organization of first the Camera Club of New York and then the Photo-Secession, organizations dedicated to the advancement of photography as an artistic rather than technical discipline. As editor of first Camera Notes (the journal of the Camera Club of New York) and then Camera Work (associated with the Photo-Secession) he promoted the work of photographers—including himself—whose work he considered cutting-edge. In addition to shaping the direction of art photography away from its early, painterly pictorialist mode to a shaper and more realistic mode known as straight photography, he also pioneered a number of advances in photographic printing. In particular, he perfected the technique known as photogravure—in which a photograph is transferred to an etching plate—for use in Camera Work, ensuring that only the highest-quality prints appeared in that journal.

Around 1910 Stieglitz took a step back from photography in order to focus on his gallery 291, where he was highlighting the work of a number of modernist American and European artists, including John Marin, Auguste Rodin, and Pablo Picasso among others. For the hyper-prolific Stieglitz a step back still meant prodigious production, however, and his work of this period is particularly focused on portraits of modern artists as well as scenes of everyday life in the city. This photograph, which was published in Camera Work in the fall 1911 issue, was made while Stieglitz was visiting Paris to make portraits of Rodin, Picasso, and other artists. It is typical of his work of this period, including the use of a close-cropped composition, sharp detail, and dense, even inky black foreground passages contrasting with a lighter middle ground. It also highlights Stieglitz and his colleagues’ ongoing interest in everyday scenes rather than the elevated, Romantic subject matter of the earlier pictorialist era.

The last two issues of Camera Work contained photographs by Paul Strand only. In addition, Alfred Stieglitz mounted an exhibition of his works at Gallery 291. At the age of 17, Strand began to study photography with Lewis Wickes Hine at the Ethical Culture School in New York City. Although Hine’s photography centered on social issues including child labor, industrial workers and immigrants at Ellis Island, he took Strand to meet Stieglitz at 291 where the young photographer was exposed to avant-garde paintings by Picasso, Cézanne, and Braque.

Strand soon rejected the then popular Pictorialist style, which emulated the effects of painting in photographs by manipulating negatives and prints. Instead, he favored achieving the minute detail and rich, subtle tonal range afforded by the use of large-format view cameras. Strand commented on his approach, “It has always been my belief that the true artist, like the true scientist, is a researcher using materials and techniques to dig into the truth and meaning of the world in which he himself lives; and what he creates or, better perhaps, brings back are the objective results of his explorations.”

His new method featured un-manipulated straight photographs, some verging on seeming abstraction. His photograph Telephone Poles appearing in the October 1916 issue of Camera Work exemplifies his investigation of form and light and the abstraction of objects. Strand’s interest in the structure of modern forms led him to collaborate with the Precisionist painter and architectural photographer Charles Sheeler in the making of the short avant-garde film Manhatta, a vision of the modern city released in 1921. Subsequently, Strand purchased an Akeley movie camera and began to work as an independent cinematographer in such government sponsored documentary films as Pare Lorentz’s The Plow that Broke the Plains. Strand’s interest in film making continued well into the early 1940s. After World War II, Strand turned to book publication as a format in which to present his photographs integrated with text, collaborating on Time in New England with Nancy Newhall, and several publications after his relocation to Europe in 1950. Strand’s career in photography and film spanned nearly 70 years.

Gilbert Stuart, the painter of this portrait, was one of the finest American portrait painters of his day, well known for depicting George Washington. Like many painters of his time, however, Stuart spent much of his career overseas, spending all but 18 months of the period from 1771 to 1793 in Scotland, England, and Ireland. He spent that time honing his craft, frequently making his living as a church organist while studying—both formally and informally—with the top painters of the era, including portraitists Joshua Reynolds and George Romney, as well as the Anglo-American history painter Benjamin West, whom he served as a studio assistant for five years. Though he was West’s student, and frequently painted the backgrounds of his large-scale paintings, Stuart’s own work was characterized by the looser brushwork and more painterly style of English painters like Romney and Reynolds, rather than West’s tight linearity.

In 1787 Stuart went to Dublin, in part to escape debts he accrued in London (he and his wife would eventually have twelve children, and he was always in need of money), and in part to escape the stiff artistic competition of the imperial capital. In Dublin he was the undisputed best portrait painter, and he set to work painting the Anglo-Irish elite. Conyngham, who had already sat for him once in London, for a portrait now at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, appears in this photo not as a politician and aristocrat, but as a scholar, which he undoubtedly was—the sale of his library after his death is the largest book auction in Irish history. Two other versions of the portrait exist, one at the Conyngham ancestral seat, Slane Castle, and the other at the Irish National Gallery of Art. It was common for patrons to request multiple copies, which they would keep at their various residences or give to friends and family as gifts.

William Henry Korn was born into a prominent Philadelphia merchant family in 1814. He was a graduate of West Point and fought in the Seminole War in Florida, 1839-1840. He resigned from the military in March of 1840 after a brief career and returned to Philadelphia to work in the family business. This portrait was painted by the pre-eminent Philadelphia portraitist Thomas Sully, a close friend of Korn's father. Sully was born in England but had come to Charleston, South Carolina, at an early age with his parents. He first studied art with his older brother, Lawrence, who was a miniaturist. Sully then benefited from the instruction of several superb painters. In 1807 he briefly studied with Gilbert Stuart in Boston; then in 1809 he traveled to London to study with Benjamin West and Sir Thomas Lawrence. From Lawrence he learned to paint in the "grand style" of Sir Joshua Reynolds. When he returned to America in 1810, Sully was proclaimed the "American Lawrence." This portrait, painted in 1841, was completed during the height of Sully's powers. Lt. Korn looks intently past the viewer off into the distance. He has just resigned from the military and is symbolically and literally looking toward a prosperous career in business. Sully is able to capture the forcefulness of the young man's personality while retaining the casual elegance of youth. The gentle sweep of the hair is echoed in the loose treatment of his cravat. The skin has the blush of vigor. Yet, it is sadly ironic that this portrait illustrating the promise of a long and successful life is completed only a year before Korn's premature death at the age of twenty-eight.

This painting is by the American animal and sporting painter Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, who is best known for his scenes of life in the American West, many of which were executed on commission for the famed lithography company Currier & Ives. Tait, who was born near Liverpool, England and never traveled west of Chicago, was a fixture in both New York City and the Adirondacks in the 1850s and 1860s. This work, with its sweetly sentimental focus on a mother deer and her baby, is much closer to the bulk of Tait’s output than his wholly invented Western scenes, however. He painted hundreds of similar depictions of both wild and domestic animals, selling most of them for between fifty and a hundred and fifty dollars, prices that were easily attainable for the newly prosperous middle class after the Civil War, and which appealed to the Victorian taste for gentle domesticity.

Tait, who claimed to be self-taught, became a master at representing fur, feathers, and other animal textures. Tait family tradition holds that he invented a method for realistically rendering fur which involved wrapping a length of silk cord around his finger and rolling it on the still-wet paint. During the 1860s, Tait produced a number of pictures to be translated into chromolithographs by the Boston printmaker Louis Prang, and engaged in a vigorous defense of the new medium in the New York Papers, asserting that the free availability of high-quality but inexpensive reproductions would naturally build in the public a respect and appreciation for art. He appears to have been only partially right, however, as the success of his chromolithographs seems to have undermined the market for pictures like this one, and in the 1870s he turned to illustrations for advertisements to make ends meet.

Henry Fitch Taylor is perhaps unique in the history of American art. Born in Cincinnati, Taylor was one of many Americans to study at the Académie Julian in Paris. During a summer spent in Giverny, he met Claude Monet, befriending the famous Impressionist and becoming one of the first Americans to experiment with the loose application and bright colors that are hallmarks of the style. Later returning to the United States, he joined the famed artist colony centered on Cos Cob, Connecticut, where he was at the center of the group known variously as Tonalists and American Impressionists. In the 1910s he became one of the central organizers of the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, commonly known as the Armory Show. This experience prompted a shift in his art, as he adopted a modernist mode informed by Cubism, Orphism, and related European avant-garde movements.  

This painting dates from the earlier, Impressionist phase of his career, and was executed while he was living in New York City, before joining the Cos Cob colony. The exact location of the scene is unknown, though it is likely somewhere in the countryside near New York; if not Connecticut then perhaps on Long Island or Upstate. It is an excellent example of American Impressionism, conveying the icy stillness of a sunny winter day after a recent snow.  

Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848–1933) represents the artistic essence of the Gilded Age through his designs for various media, especially glass. In 1893, he established the Stourbridge Glass Company, later Tiffany Furnaces, to allow for greater design control and experimentation with glass. Tiffany referred to all the glassworks from his glasshouse as Favrile glass, a name that originated from the term “fabrile”, meaning handmade. Arthur J. Nash, an experienced English glassmaker, partnered with Tiffany and supervised the production at the glasshouse. Nash, alongside an intimate group of chemists, experimented to find the perfect recipes for Favrile glass. Experimentation among the glass-workers was encouraged to create unique, one of-a-kind designs.

By 1895, Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company increased production. Tiffany wanted to provide more small, easy to transport, and commercially attractive products. The company offered Favrile blown-glass vessels in many ways; they varied in form, size, color, and price to appeal to different audiences. This work with a vertical curved form, exhibits intricate patterns associated with Tiffany’s “Byzantine” wares. The popularity of these works continued to grow as Tiffany expanded its stores and made these products available at galleries, retailers, and exhibitions across Europe.

American artist Louis Comfort Tiffany began his career as a painter in 1866, but his interest in the decorative arts prevailed. Inspired by the Aesthetic Movement, he valued harmonious interiors, decorated with ornate glass, furniture, ceramics, and textiles that beautified the everyday. By 1892 he established Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company which designed interiors and produced decorative mosaics, windows, and glass.

A significant portion of Tiffany’s commissions were interior decorations for places of worship, specifically memorial windows. This window, originally made for Greeley Presbyterian Church, St. Louis, Missouri, features medieval and gothic motifs, favored for ecclesiastical designs. Designers frequently renewed and modified compositions of earlier windows to fulfill requests and enhance production. The central figure of Christ, flanked by gothic tracery and decorative roundels, features a skillful selection of brilliantly colored leaded glass, including “jewels,” streaky drapery, and spotted glass. His “jewels,” mold-pressed glass, are the small, opalescent, paisley-shaped elements around the figure. Streaky glass, the modern name for glass made from two or more colors, is seen in the royal-blue panels in the background. Drapery glass, with heavy folds to mimic fabric, is seen in the robes of Christ. The green accents along the border are good examples of spotted or mottled glass.

John Henry Twachtman was born in Cincinnati, studying under Frank Duveneck there. He followed Duveneck to Munich, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts. After a brief return to the United States—in which he caused a sensation with the brushy realism he had learned in Munich—he returned to Europe, this time to study at the Académie Julian in Paris. While in Paris he was one of a number of Americans who were influenced by the landscape style of the French Barbizon School, adopting the hazy, gray-green style that would become the hallmark of his work in the 1880s. Moving to a farm in Greenwich, Connecticut, he became one of the foremost exemplars of the personal, subjective style known as Tonalism, later incorporating some of the brighter colors and immediacy of Impressionism into his work.

In addition to easel painting, Twachtman was a practitioner of etching and drawing in pastels, both of which were popular among artists of his generation. This work is a mix of several mediums, though pastels are dominant. Depicting the evening sunset, likely in or near his farm, the drawing is dominated by a hazy green foreground and a steely sky. The entire scene is suffused with the blush of pink and a golden yellow, suggesting the influence of the setting sun just out of view. The haziness and sketchy quality is a hallmark of Tonalism, but also might signal that Twachtman made this work in preparation for a more finished one in oil.

Executed during Twachtman’s brief stay in Cincinnati after his return from Munich, this painting exemplifies the realist style he adopted after that first European sojourn. It depicts Avondale, a newly developed suburb in the hills just outside of Cincinnati. The city—which was undergoing rapid expansion of both population and industrial activity—had become overcrowded and deeply polluted. The hills outside the city, long unpopulated due to their steepness, had finally been opened for settlement due to the construction of a special type of inclined-plane railway. Twachtman’s in-laws were one of the few families living in Avondale before this expansion, and the artist and his wife lived with them before establishing their own household nearby.

The building depicted is one of the new, urban-type dwellings beginning to be erected, a clue that this is not a rural scene but rather one of rapid urbanization. Twachtman represents the scene with a kind of yellow-brown haze, one appropriate to a city that was widely known as the most polluted in the United States, but also a hallmark of the Munich School. Critics, originally receptive to this style’s novelty and intense realism, soon began to sour on its monotony. They urged Twachtman and his fellows to seek out more poetic subject matter. This exhortation—along with Twachtman’s own experiences in Barbizon—prompted him (along with his fellows) towards the aesthetic that would become known as Tonalism.

This group of prints is part of the Portfolio of Spanish Colonial Design commissioned by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project in New Mexico in 1937. They were specifically part of the Index of American Design (IAD), which sought to “preserve a national, ancestral aesthetic” by depicting everyday utilitarian objects such as signs, quilts, and religious icons in addition to the creation of community art centers. These images document and preserve folk objects and religious artifacts that were of significance in colonial New Mexico, particularly in churches and other public buildings. The original portfolio included images of 50 objects reproduced in an edition of 200. It is unclear why the project was cancelled, but it is possible that the focus on religious imagery did not align well with the social and labor justice focus of the WPA. However, New Mexico was very active during this time and today preserves over 100 works created through the WPA, including murals, paintings, and sculptures in various cities and towns throughout the state.   

Elihu Vedder, the scion of an old New York Dutch family, has long occupied a singular place in the history of American art. He spent the majority of his long career in Rome, returning to the United States only briefly during the Civil War, during which he tried to enlist in the Union Army but was rejected due to the aftereffects of a childhood injury. He remained a passionate supporter of both the Union cause and the Risorgimento, the Italian unification movement that achieved its goals in 1861, just as the United States was fighting its own unification battles. His support for Italian unification grew out of his association with the Macchiaioli, a group of painters active in Tuscany who rejected staid academicism in favor of naturalistic depictions of the countryside and its inhabitants. While he was in New York Vedder fell in with a group of Bohemian writers and artists that included Walt Whitman, William Morris Hunt, and Fitz Hugh Ludlow, among others. During this time Vedder became more interested in esoteric, spiritual subjects, often drawn from mythology and his understanding of Eastern spiritualism. 

These interests aligned Vedder with the international movement known as Aestheticism, and his work after his postwar return to Rome (this time for good) increasingly took on a similarly dreamily exotic cast. He is best remembered today—and was renowned in his time—for his illustrations for an 1884 edition of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. This poem, which had been translated into English by Edward FitzGerald in 1859, was celebrated by Aesthetes for its hedonism as well as the alternative it presented to what many perceived as Anglo-American culture’s puritanism and strict rationalism. Love Ever Present—sometimes translated as “Love Survives Unconquered”—was painted just after the publication of his Rubaiyat, alongside several paintings based on drawings from the poem. It depicts a youthful Cupid standing atop a Janus-faced pedestal that opposes the faces of Psyche (the object of Cupid’s love) and Pan (avatar of sensual pleasure). It thus represents love in all its guises, both spiritual and physical, and is characteristic of Vedder’s work at this time, which was similarly balanced between spiritual and earthly concerns. 

Relatively little is known about Mary Josephine Walters, the Brooklyn- and New Jersey-based painter who made this scene, though she was once reported as the favorite female student of Asher Brown Durand, perhaps the best-known of the Hudson River School of landscape painters clustered in and around New York City in the middle of the nineteenth century. Women were active members of this group, but have tended to receive relatively little scholarly attention, due to biases both among their contemporaries in the nineteenth century and in more recent scholarship. Women—who were constrained by their roles as wives and mothers as well as the stiff, uncomfortable clothing they were obliged to wear—rarely had the same opportunities to travel into the countryside to seek inspiration as did their male counterparts.

Walters adopted one strategy for avoiding the constraints of domestic life, which was to never marry—indeed, many of the most successful female Hudson River School painters were windowed or unmarried. This scene, showing a pair of canoes on the shore of the titular river, is ample evidence that she made her way into the Catskills. Though the scene seems wild at first glance, with tree-covered peaks looming over the water of the river as it winds its way into the distance, the presence of the two canoes—not to mention the sawn boards leaning on the fallen trees at the composition’s lower left—speak to the encroachment of white notions of civilization into the supposed wilderness.

This small painting is similar to Walters’ other work in the collection, Hudson River Scene, but the smaller scale and overhanging branches of a willow tree lend it a greater intimacy. These overhanging boughs—as well as the painting’s restrained palette—were hallmarks of Asher Brown Durand, Walters’ teacher and the acknowledged dean of the Hudson River School. His “Letters on Landscape Painting,” published in the influential journal The Crayon, exhorted American artists to take nature as their studio, and to avoid ostentatious or overly broad use of color. In works by Durand, Worthington Whittredge, and Mary Josephine Walters, the overhanging branches signified a kind of natural cathedral, transforming the American backcountry into a secular temple for the dominant white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant notion of a harmonious union between natural beauty and the calming effects of civilization.

Born in Pennsylvania, Benjamin West worked as a portraitist in Philadelphia until 1763 when he moved to London to continue his education and establish himself as an artist. When he arrived, he declared himself a history painter, an ostentatiously ambitious move for a young unknown who had no commissions to speak of and seemingly few chances to earn any. Supporting himself through portraiture, West set about the task of building a patronage network, stunning observers by virtue of his meteoric rise through the painting profession in the years before the Civil War. In 1772 King George III appointed him historical painter to the court, a position which paid a thousand-pound annual salary and made West the most prominent painter in the English-speaking world. His fellow Americans flocked to his studio for training, and he trained huge numbers of them, including such well-known figures as Gilbert Stuart, John Trumbull, and several members of the Peale family. In 1792 West was elected to succeed Joshua Reynolds as president of the Royal Academy, confirming his position at the top of British painting.  

By the time this portrait was made, in the early nineteenth century, West’s style of history painting was beginning to wane in popularity, but he was still a sought-after portraitist. In particular, American tourists undertaking the Grand Tour of the British Isles and the Continent sought his services, seeking to commemorate their experiences. This is one such portrait, depicting the wife and daughter of a prominent Baltimorean named Thomas Keyes. They are shown in an elegant interior that overlooks an idealized, picturesque landscape, hallmarks of the Grand Manner style of portraiture. They are accompanied by the accoutrements of refined travel, including a portfolio of prints at the lower left. West always intended to return to the United States; though he never did, he maintained his American identity to the end of his days.  

This etching, which depicts the Old Battersea Bridge, was first published at an auspicious time for both its subject and creator, the American expatriate artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler. By 1879 the Old Battersea was the last surviving wooden bridge over the Thames, and thus had attracted a great deal of attention from artists, including Whistler himself, who had depicted the bridge in several paintings and etchings during the 1870s. The bridge was also increasingly incompatible with modern London, which was at the time the largest city in the world with over three million inhabitants. Small and rickety, and placed on a tricky-to-navigate stretch of the river, the bridge was taken over by the city in 1879, which soon closed it to all but pedestrian traffic before demolishing it in favor of a more modern span in 1885.

Whistler, who was best known in his time for his etchings but is now celebrated for his oil paintings, had seen those paintings get him into trouble in the late 1870s. Falling further and further into debt due to his lavish lifestyle, the artist sued the influential critic John Ruskin in 1878 for accusing him of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face” with his 1877 painting Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket (Detroit Institute of Arts), which also depicts the bridge. Though Whistler ultimately prevailed in the trial the jury awarded him only a single farthing (around a quarter of a cent) in damages, leading to his bankruptcy in 1879. Even before this he had turned to etching in an attempt to revive his flagging fortunes, releasing a series of picturesque Thames scenes in 1878 and 1879. Though less abstract and formally adventurous than other etchings of the 1870s, this work shows Whistler’s virtuosic understanding of the medium, and his ability to call forth the luminous water and evanescent air with just a few whispery lines.

The American expatriate James Abbott McNeill Whistler moved to London permanently in 1859, when he was twenty-five years old. That summer was the second in the ongoing public health disaster that is now known—somewhat quaintly—as The Great Stink. By 1857 250 tons of raw sewage, plus uncounted amounts of industrial chemicals, were being dumped into the river every day, and the smell was becoming overwhelming. The river was also the main source of water for over two million Londoners, and the city had been through a number of cholera epidemics in the first half of the century. Though modern germ theory would not become widely accepted in Europe until the 1880s, it was well understood that low water quality contributed to these outbreaks of illness. Despite the river’s low reputation at the time when he arrived, Whistler immediately fell in love with the great waterway, lovingly depicting its rough-hewn workmen, picturesque old wooden bridges, and fleets of ferries, fishing boats, and barges. Even as his fellow artists decamped to more fashionable districts Whistler remained in Chelsea, overlooking the river he so loved.

His patience was rewarded in 1875, when London completed a new sewer system that carried waste downstream of the city, leading to a rapid clearing of the waters. Other modernization efforts—including the replacement of old wooden bridges like this one with more modern spans—would further change the river’s character in the following years, but during the 1870s Whistler captured the river in all its current glory. He frequently brought his copper etching plates with him on rowing excursions up and down the river, drawing directly into the wax before making further changes back in his studio. Over half of this print is dedicated to the water itself, and Whistler has made the striking choice to use a great deal of negative space, allowing a few lines to stand in for the mighty river. His distinctive butterfly monogram is visible towards the lower right, boldly inserting his presence into the placid scene.

Born on a farm outside Springfield, Ohio, Worthington Whittredge had his formative artistic experiences in Cincinnati, a bustling industrial and trade city that also served as a regional artistic center in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. While working as a house painter, he taught himself to paint signs, create daguerreotypes, and later portrait and landscape painting in oils. One of his early efforts received complimentary notice from Asher Brown Durand, a well-known landscape painter and the president of the National Academy of Design. This early success encouraged Whittredge to further his studies in Düsseldorf, then the site of an international artists’ community centered on the Düsseldorfer Kunstakademie (The Düsseldorf Art Academy). Whittredge studied with fellow American Emanuel Leutze, serving as the model for George Washington in Leutze’s 1848 painting Washington Crossing the Delaware (Metropolitan Museum of Art). He soon became a fixture of the American community in the city, serving as a mentor and friend to his countrymen as they arrived. He also traveled extensively throughout Europe, only returning to America in 1859, over ten years after his arrival in Europe.  

This painting dates from one of the most productive periods of Whittredge’s career, when he flourished both as a painter and as a leader in the National Academy of Design and the broader American artistic community. He frequently revisited his favorite places, giving many of his landscapes a feeling of lived-in familiarity. The subject is fairly unique in his career (there is a similar painting from the same time in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts), depicting one of the religious camp revival meetings that once formed a key part of the social life of the American countryside. By the 1870s the period of intense religious fervor that spawned the camp meetings had mostly subsided, giving this picture a nostalgic air. Whittredge concentrates his celebrants in the painting’s middle ground, incorporating them as a part of the landscape, rather than offering portraits of individual worshippers. 

Guy Carleton Wiggins, an American painter known for his Impressionist technique, began his artistic career at an early age. He first learned the art of painting from his father, Carleton Wiggins (1848–1932), an American landscape painter. Guy Wiggins continued his education in architecture at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, and in art at the National Academy of Design. By the end of his studies, Impressionism was the leading academic style, and several artists of the New York art scene informed his practice. Wiggins observed the techniques of Childe Hassam (1859–1935) and other American Impressionist painters of “The Ten,” a group of artists established in 1898 that were displeased with the conservatism in the American art scene. From their style, he developed feathery brushwork and a soft color palette.

This painting presents a slight shift in Wiggins’ style and subject matter. During a trip to France in 1925, he found inspiration in the small historic towns and mountainous landscapes of places like Saint-Paul-de-Vence. In this painting, he utilizes a saturated palette of green and blue hues to convey the layered hillside of the medieval town. The bold lines and blocks of color evoke a modernist and colorist approach to landscape painting reminiscent of those by French artist Paul Cézanne (1839–1906).

William Williams has long been known primarily for his association with his most famous pupil, the renowned Anglo-American painter (and longtime President of the Royal Academy) Benjamin West. Much of Williams’s life story has come down via West’s recollections as well as from a highly fictionalized account of his life the older painter left behind. Williams appears to have had no formal artistic training, surfacing as a semi-itinerant portrait painter in Philadelphia by 1747, when he served as the first teacher for West, though he was only eleven or so years West’s senior. Though he toiled in semi-obscurity for much of his career, eventually dying penniless back in England, Williams was active in the fledgling artistic life of Pennsylvania, as well as Maryland and Virginia (where he also spent time). In addition to mentoring other artists, Williams collected prints and writings on aesthetics, both common practices for more formally educated artists of the time. 

This piece shows another way in which Williams was plugged in to the artistic mainstream of his time. It belongs to a genre of painting known as the “conversation piece,” for the way in which it depicts small, intimate groups of people—most often families—in informal conversational gatherings. In formal portraits in the contemporary style known as the Grand Manner, sitters were usually represented singly and in life size, against simple backgrounds designed to highlight their individual personalities. Conversation pieces, on the other hand, were considered more naturalistic, showing figures in three-dimensional space and in direct relation to one another. Strikingly, this parklike setting is the Denning family’s home on Wall Street, still mostly a rural hinterland on New York’s northern frontier in the years just before the Revolution. By representing these wealthy Americans in what contemporaries understood as informal, naturalistic space, Williams demonstrated his understanding of the cutting edge of late-eighteenth-century art, despite his situation on the colonial periphery.

Carl Wuermer was born in Munich, Germany and immigrated to the United States by 1915. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1920 to 1924, followed by the Art Students League in New York. He then moved Upstate, to Woodstock, New York, where he spent the remainder of his life. He has often been compared to and categorized alongside Regionalist artists such as Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry, despite the fact that Regionalism is usually understood to be a resolutely Midwestern phenomenon. Wuermer did share those artists’ concerns with the honest dignity of farms and farmers, however, usually painting recognizable people and places from in and around Woodstock.  

This painting was made on the property of a farmer named Hellmann in Cold Brook, New York, some hundred and fifty miles northwest of Woodstock. Somewhat uncharacteristically for Wuermer, he has in this work represented the landscape in a somewhat blocky, quasi-Modernist style reminiscent of the work of contemporaries such as John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe, and other members of the Alfred Stieglitz circle, many of whom spent time near Lake George in Northeastern New York. This work thus blends two strains of American modernism—Regionalism and proto-abstraction—that are usually seen as at odds with one another.