Gilbert Munger's quest for distinction

Magazine Antiques, July, 2003 by Michael D. Schroeder, J. Gray Sweeney

When the King expedition took to the field again from San Francisco in August 1870, Munger accompanied them to Mount Shasta and the Pacific Northwest. In November of that year he returned to New York City but by May 1872 he was traveling west again, this time at his own expense, to paint at Shoshone Falls in Idaho and in California He returned to New York once again in November 1873 and then embarked on a third trip west to sketch Yosemite and the Sierras in the summer of 1875, a trip that lasted through November.

While in New York between trips Munger filled orders for paintings of western scenery based on his oil sketches. An example, Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite Valley (P1. VI), is a picture that a geologist, tourist, or art connoisseur could admire, with its clarifying light and precise topographical detail. He also spent time in Saint Paul and Duluth, Minnesota, where his artistic talents were pressed into civic service. Duluth (Pl. VIII) was commissioned to promote a proposed Lake Superior and Mississippi Railroad and to show the newly accessible harbor at the western extreme of the Great Lakes. The scene carries our gaze across a panoramic expanse of Lake Superior to a distant horizon suggesting the earth's curvature against a luminous sky.

Munger's paintings of western subjects were making an impression back east. In 1872 a critic in Washington, D. C., commented: "It must gratify Mr. Munger's old friends here to know that he is rapidly and surely taking his place in the front rank of American artists." (10) By the time of the United States centennial, Munger was nationally recognized as a gifted landscape painter.

In 1877 artistic ambition led Munger to England to search for new styles and international artistic distinction. Perhaps noticing that be had already profited handsomely from sales to English tourists in the United States, he set up a studio in London, where he quickly became a successful painter and etcher working among the cosmopolitan expatriates. Asked later the reason he had moved to Europe, Munger replied: "It is the sure means of growth in art everywhere at hand in these old lands." (11) Reflecting years later, he wrote:

After exhausting my American studies I changed my method completely, and went to work painting the natural scenery of England and France, changing from mountains, bluffs and rugged natural scenes, such as I had been handling to the soft, mellow and reposeful scenes of the countries named. (12)

Talent and hard work provided success in a highly competitive field of artists. Munger quickly enjoyed patronage and professional recognition in England, where he was befriended by John Everett Millais (1829-1896). He sketched in Scotland with Millais, who invited the young American to "swell entertainments" at his grand studio in London. (13) "Millais is now one of my best friends in London and has more influence than any other artist here," Munger wrote to the geologist Samuel Franklin Emmons (1841-1911) in 1877, adding that he had dined in Paris with Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904), the African explorer, and in London with Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890), the German archaeologist, who, Munger wrote, "has been digging up Troy and expects to dig up the whole world before he gets through." (14)