Museum accessions - 19th century paintings

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 1999 by Eleanor H. Gustafson

By his own admission, in the late 1870s Eastman Johnson suffered from "cranberry fever," a seasonal preoccupation with trying to capture on canvas the light and colors of the autumn cranberry harvest on the island of Nantucket, where he had a house and studio. He ultimately cured himself by producing one of his most luminous and evocative works, The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket (now in the Timken Art Gallery in San Diego), which he showed to wide acclaim at the National Academy of Design in New York City in 1880. The painting was the subject of an exhibition at the Timken Art Gallery in 1990, which included thirteen studies for the work - symptomatic of Johnson's recurring bouts of the fever.

Recently, Susan Strickler, the director of the Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, discovered another study in the hands of a nephew of its original owner, Thomas Stitt Van Loan (1845-1930), a New York spice merchant and collector of American and European paintings. It has since been donated to the Currier Gallery, making it the first work by Johnson to enter the collection. More freely painted than the final canvas, the Currier's newly discovered study was probably painted out-of-doors while the harvest was actually underway.

Also new at the Currier Gallery is Mercie Cutting Flowers (also known as Portrait of a Young Lady), by Edmund C. Tarbell. Depicting the artist's middle daughter on the front porch of the family's house in New Castle, New Hampshire, this vibrant canvas has often been considered a study for Tarbell's Going For a Ride (private collection) of the same year. It is, however, a fully finished painting in its own right, embodying what sets American impressionism apart from French. In it Tarbell has rendered the figure as a solid, three-dimensional form, her profile clearly delineated against a background painted with the recognizably impressionist interest in light and the dissolution of form. Tarbell gave the painting to Mercie (1894-1961), who in turn gave it to Dr. Samuel Mixter, whose grandson made it a partial gift to the museum.

George Caleb Bingham's paintings are often considered iconic images of the boatmen who plied the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers in the mid-nineteenth century, bringing cargo and civilization to the American West. As Mark Twain did in words, Bingham sought to do more than simply record the lives of the riverboatmen. He attempted to capture in paint the atmosphere of the river itself, experimenting with light and shadows to achieve different effects.

Among the last of Bingham's pictures of river life are two rare nighttime scenes, both painted in 1854. One is in the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and the other, illustrated here, has fittingly been given to the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, where it forms the centerpiece of the museum's holdings of paintings of the American West. In both canvases Bingham employed the off-center pyramidal figural composition that imparts a sense of monumentality to many of his works, and then he used firelight and the glow of moonlight or dawn to integrate the immediacy of the human scene with the seemingly infinite nature of time and space.