"American Gems: Exceptional Paintings from Hudson River to Early Modern"

Who would have thought in the 2020s it would be possible to assemble a superb gathering of nineteenth-century American paintings? This choice collection contradicts the impossible. Beyond the established holdings in older major institutions like the Metropolitan Museum, the National Gallery, and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, there are significant concentrations in cities, like Philadelphia, Chicago, and Detroit. We also have numerous regional museums with fine holdings in depth, such as the Amon Carter Museum, Addison Gallery, and de Young Museum.

In addition, we saw during the 1970s the assemblage of outstanding private collections, like those of Ray and Margaret Horowitz, Dan and Rita Fraad, and Jo Ann and Julian Ganz. And in the early 2000s Alice Walton undertook the wizardry of creating a new American art museum, Crystal Bridges, in Bentonville, Arkansas, built around numerous masterpieces, many acquired as a result of extensive deaccessioning by private collectors as well as public institutions during the recession of those years. It was widely thought finding great works had expired.

The heart of this collection centers on a group of beautiful oil paintings by several of the major figures of the Hudson River School, beginning with an oil sketch by its founder Thomas Cole, an outstanding Asher Durand landscape of 1855, plus an equally impressive Frederick Church seasonal landscape titled Autumn dated 1853 and continuing with artists of the second generation, Albert Bierstadt, David Johnson, and Sanford Gifford. There are works related to the luminist tradition by Martin Johnson Heade, William Trost Richards, and Samuel Colman. Examples in a quasi-impressionist manner and tonalist style are present with George Inness, Ralph Blakelock, Walter Launt Palmer, and Willard Metcalf. Together, these offer a survey of highlights of American landscape painting through much of the nineteenth century.

Genre painting makes an appearance with a characteristic image from Eastman Johnson. Additionally, a handful of pictures touch on the new styles of the early twentieth century: a fauvist-style beach scene by William Glackens, Crepuscule by Maurice Prendergast, Childe Hassam’s The Cove, 1901, and an abstract impression of New York by John Marin. The one still life here is a composition by Marsden Hartley, and there are stark landscapes by Rockwell Kent and Fairfield Porter. They all share an intimacy of effect as well as express the particular individuality of each artist’s style.

Cole was born in England at the outset of the nineteenth century and grew up aware of the transformation of nature by the early Industrial Revolution. He made his way as a youth to the New World, settling first in New York and exploring the Hudson Valley and Catskills for his early landscapes. He pursued two major courses in his art, the mythological and the topographic. His sketch of Boston follows in the emerging tradition of estate and city views common at the beginning of the century, notably by William Groombridge and William Birch. But Cole modifies his realistic subject, with its focus on the gleaming dome of Charles Bulfinch’s Boston State House in the distance, by raising it above the city in a near mountainous terrain. The figures in the foreground could almost be pilgrims surveying the holy city of Jerusalem. By such exaggerations Cole blends the real with the ideal in his lofty interpretation.

Albert Bierstadt was one of the most successful practitioners of the next generation and absorbed many of the artistic conventions from English painting that Cole had introduced into America. While he was also interested in the grandeur of wilderness scenery, he preferred painting recognizable sites. Venturing into the upper reaches of New York and New England, he took on the visual drama of Niagara Falls along with numerous contemporaries. Although never attaining the monumental power that his rival Frederic Church did in his 1857 canvas, Bierstadt did a number of compelling paintings of the falls, most enhanced with rainbows, technical effects that rivet our attention. Here he cleverly juxtaposes the curving arches of colored light coming in from the left with the counter curves of water pouring over the falls at right center. Bierstadt was a notably strong colorist, and with utter simplicity sets these highlights against his passages of dark green blues.

He would also come to be known as one of our foremost painters of the American West. From the 1860s to eighties Bierstadt visited various western sites and painted dramatic atmospheric views on returning to his studio in the east. His salon paintings rivaled Frederic Church’s comparable grand canvases of South America, in commanding the then astronomical prices of $10,000. His canvas of Mount St. Helens, ca. 1889, is such an example. Thomas Cole had several decades earlier depicted a similar view of Mount Etna from Taormina, and his follower Church had painted the great mountain volcanoes of Cotopaxi and Chimborazo in the northern Andes in the 1850s and sixties. Like Church, Bierstadt also celebrated these snow-covered peaks of the New World, symbols of American hemispheric power and self-confidence. The near perfect conical geometry and icy mantles not only suggested a timelessness extending back to the dawn of creation, but also a
purity from European landscapes.

David Johnson, also a second-generation Hudson River School artist, is often perceived as a slightly less accomplished follower of John F. Kensett. Yet like many second-tier painters, he could rise to a level of perfection comparable to the best of his colleagues. Such is the case with his Rogers’ Slide, 1870, a typical view in the upper reaches of the Hudson Valley. The valley view with cliffs or trees to each side was a formula introduced by Cole, with precedents in the English paintings of Constable and Turner. Johnson was a highly capable draftsman, and the precision of his craft is evident in the sharply delineated rock formations here, balanced by the cool transparencies of the water surface and distant blue skies. It is a tranquil scene of repose suited for meditating on God’s hand in nature.

Sanford Gifford’s An October Afternoon, 1865, set in a valley of the Catskills, is part of a series of larger canvases, including a culminating version in the Metropolitan Museum, that takes us into the luminist style. This places new emphasis on light and atmosphere and especially far-reaching horizons. Reminiscent of Turner, Gifford gives us a radiant setting sun at center, backlighting the trees to the left and reflected off the foreground rocks. This, too, was intended to invite contemplation of the divine presence in the American wilderness. An even more perfect embodiment of luminist calm is to be found in Martin Johnson Heade’s small gem, Approaching Storm, set near Narragansett, Rhode Island. Painted thirty years after his original imposing canvas now in the Metropolitan Museum, it captures the essence of the luminist sensibility, with its low horizon, attenuated horizontal format, and utter quiet. This now disregards Cole’s practice of framing foliage at either side and opens up his vista both to the edges and in depth. During the Civil War years American artists concentrated on at least three major themes to address the horrors and fright of the period: fiery sunsets, seen foremost in the work of Church, shipwrecks, and impending thunder-storms. Heade was the master of the latter and executed a half dozen storm scenes during the war period. This one gives up the blazing colors of fall foliage, often associated with Jasper Cropsey, for total blackness. The tranquility of the moment paradoxically bears the tension of a thunderstorm about to explode. In earlier Hudson River views the central circle might offer a reflection of blue skies, an oculus on the heavens so to speak, also at the heart of Henry David Thoreau’s descriptions of Walden Pond. Now we face a dark void, a stark modification of the formula to suit the specters of violence and death. We don’t know why Heade chose to return to this subject so many years later, except that he must have considered it to be one of the most powerful and memorable of his career.

Also in the mid-sixties Heade ventured to South America, to undertake an ambitious project in Brazil, documenting the many variants of regional hummingbirds. This was to lead to a series of chromolithographs he would publish in London. Some half-dozen prints were issued, but the full project never came to fruition. He did, however, paint dozens of small canvases, sixteen isolated as a group known at the Gems of Brazil, now in the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas. Hummingbirds and Red Flowers is clearly related to this group. It shows male and female birds in their natural habitat, some-times nesting, sometimes fighting. These show a Darwinian sensibility in their attention to local environment. Compositionally, they represent a new composite subject, the fusion of still life and landscape painting. Most are rich in coloring, with Heade balancing greens, reds, and blues. They are among the most original paintings of his career and of the nineteenth century.

Another second-generation painter in the Hudson River School was William Trost Richards, one of the finest draftsmen of his time. Almost too prolific for his own good, he filled dozens of sketch books with intimate drawings and watercolors, characterized by meticulous detail and jewel-like textures. Gradually, his painting style loosened somewhat, and he became equally interested in glowing effects of sunlight. His 1877 canvas, At Atlantic City, shows an added interest in glowing light on the distant horizon, an element we might associate with luminism, even while he retains a more traditional Hudson River composition.

A relatively recent acquisition also happens to be the largest landscape by far to enter the collection. Despite its size, Winter on the Hudson, 1869, by James Hart perfectly complements the original core holdings of smaller sketches and oils by other Hudson River School painters.
It helps to demonstrate the trajectory many artists took from intimate plein-air studies to large scale studio canvases intended for public exhibition. Hart is well recognized as a second-generation Hudson River painter, and often considered a second-tier artist. But as is frequently the case, such figures are periodically capable of ambitious works of the top rank. Winter on the Hudson is such an example. The picture is a relative rarity in depicting the river landscape in winter, with ice on the river and snow in the woods. Frederic Church did several oil studies of his view from Olana in winter, and the Hart also connects with the winter scene in the collection by the master of that season, Walter Launt Palmer. Yet it is no ordinary wilderness scene: we note the puff of steam on a vessel at the far horizon of the river, and a horse and carriage making its way forward on a country road at the left. Hart seeks to balance the purity of nature with man’s domestic presence.

Also painting through mid-century was Samuel Colman, perhaps best known for his views along the upper reaches of the Hudson. In this collection is his large oil canvas of a radiant sunset on the western plains, his embrace of the luminist sensibility emphasizing afternoon sunlight, a low horizon, and vast spatial recession. It might even be a seascape, yet depicts little of the physical world, where some far off Native American figures are barely visible in the distance. It is an exclamatory response to the viewing of a grand natural display and conveys the expansive American vision during the years of western exploration and settlement.

More in the category of tonalism are the oils by George Inness and Ralph Albert Blakelock. The former began in the tight Hudson River manner, and under exposure to French Barbizon art, gradually moved to the looser impressionistic style we see here. Inness had gone back to France and Italy in the 1890s, and soon evolved into relying on the poetic, almost visionary, effects we see in his view at Étretat. By contrast, his contemporary, Blakelock, like another colleague, Albert Ryder, truly engaged his inner visions. He, too, started in the general conventions of Hudson River painting, but gradually moved to almost hallucinatory depictions of moonlight in the woods. He developed a painting technique of laying in his ground, then building up his pigments, he drew in the leaves and branches, to create his haunting effects of light glowing through the foliage. It was a singular original style, and one of the most original in the late nineteenth century.

Representing aspects of impressionism are the works by Walter Launt Palmer and Williard Metcalf, both are exemplary works by each. Palmer could be a highly repetitive artist, painting almost by formula in his familiar winter vistas always in a palette of bluish whites. The title here, The Leaning Tree, calls attention to a particular freshness in Palmer’s composition. The snow-covered tree falling at river’s edges over the stream creates an unusual eye-catching element that lifts this picture well above a cliché.

Metcalf in turn was one of the many American artists in the last quarter of the century to flock to Giverny outside of Paris, and paint in the manner of the great French master Claude Monet. His Poppy Field of 1886, with its array of red flowers, green grasses, and local French farmhouses, summarizes a style and subject matter also familiar to us in the art of William Merritt Chase and others in this generation.

There is one important genre painting in this collection that calls to mind the work of William Sidney Mount at mid-century and leads us to the mid- career art of Winslow Homer in the 1870s and eighties. This is Eastman Johnson’s Confidence and Admiration, 1859. Johnson had academic training in New York, and a period of travel abroad. In particular, he had exposure to the Dusseldorf School in Germany, which encouraged meticulous drawing. For a number of years he worked in a studio in the Tenth Street Studio building in lower Manhattan, where Homer also rented space. From the late 1850s on, both were engaged in Black subjects of American life, as the nation moved steadily toward conflict. They also shared other themes in common, young boys at play outdoors, and fashionable women posing on hillsides. Both were unusually capable of depicting Black Americans with sympathy and understanding. Johnson was a consummate draftsman, especially in charcoal, and he was able to translate his figures solidly into his painted compositions. This 1859 work shows the German influence in its careful modeling and a general Northern European sensibility for tonal contrasts. There is no caricature here, only the central theme of music, with the banjo as focus, a typical device of the artist. A younger boy to the side listens and learns. We feel a quiet yet relaxed dignity in this informal everyday scene. It was a popular image throughout the nineteenth century, from Mount in the 1840s to Thomas Eakins in the 1880s and Henry O. Tanner at century’s end.

Twentieth-century works make up a smaller proportion of this collection, but they are also choice and interesting examples that complement the earlier core of the collection. A work by William Glackens represents the Ashcan School, not one of the more famous or influential figures like George Bellows or Robert Henri. The Glackens oil of a boating party and beachgoers reminds us of the post-impressionist views of Maurice Prendergast shown in evening, among others, and the promenading figures of John Sloan, a colorful assembly in a bright landscape. This comes at the end of nineteenth-century outdoor landscape painting, first in France and then America, just before the advent of modernist abstraction. It celebrates the popular resort world of urban and suburban parks at the beginning of the new century and the pleasures of everyday life during the decade before World War I.

We see the arrival of abstract impulses in the canvases of John Marin and Marsden Hartley. With its slashing lines and fragmented elements, the Marin is a distant reworking of cubist ideas he first saw in Europe early in the century. Painted in 1950, it also makes a nod to the dynamic compositions and brushwork of Jackson Pollock. The Hartley is a rare still life here, displaying his knowledge of Picasso, Matisse, and German painting.

With the addition of a New Mexico landscape by Georgia O’Keeffe the collection now includes a beautiful and strong example by America’s most important woman artist. Noted early in the century as a rising modernist in the circle of the important photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz, whom she soon married, O’Keeffe developed a style fusing realism with abstraction. The couple had worked at Lake George in the east, but O’Keeffe had also become attracted to the American Southwest, and after Stieglitz’s death in 1946, she pursued another half-life as a solo artist settled mostly in northern New Mexico. There she found endless subject matter in the abstract patterns of her buildings’ doorways and the rolling hillsides of the nearby landscape. The Fox canvas is of a modest scale which fits comfortably with the earlier landscapes, but offers its own modern harmonies of rhythmic contours and muted tonalities.

Two beautiful landscapes round out the collection and circle back to its original strengths. Rockwell Kent’s Greenland vista from the 1930s summarizes the passion for regionalist subjects in that decade, which we know from the work of Andrew Wyeth, Charles Burchfield, and Grant Wood. With the careful faceting of his forms, Kent captures the arctic scenery with his blend of realism and abstraction. Another artist who was essentially a realist during the age of abstract expressionism was Fairfield Porter, who continued to paint his evocative and simplified scenes to the end of his career. Clearly a work of modern sensibility, it nicely recalls the sunsets of its predecessors in the collection, like Sandford Gifford and Samuel Colman.

Whether standing on its own or integrated into a larger American collection, this group glows with its own integrity. What fun it should be for the owner and collaborating curators to make judicious additions over time!