Nineteenth-century American paintings

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2005 by Lee A. Vedder

As one of the nation's great museum repositories of nineteenth-century American painting, the New-York Historical Society has few equals as to the depth and richness of its holdings of portraits, genre scenes, and landscape paintings. Brimming with masterworks by renowned artists of the period and reflecting the tastes of pioneering art patrons, this exceptional collection bears telling witness to the groundbreaking history of American art and connoisseurship as it evolved in nineteenth-century New York as well as to the society's emergence as a preeminent museum of fine art. (1)

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The Luman Reed Collection, donated to the society in 1858, is one of the most important early nineteenth-century collections of American art that survives intact. Comprising the original core of the society's fine arts holdings, it reflects the extraordinary collecting tastes of Luman Reed. (2)

Reed was born on a farm in Green River (in the area that is now Austerlitz), New York. He began his business career as a store clerk in the Hudson River village of Coxsackie, New York, before moving to New York City in 1815. There he became one of the city's most prominent merchants with the Front Street dry-goods firm he established with various partners, the last being Jonathan Sturges (1802-1874). With his wealth Reed assembled in the course of six years one of the earliest and most significant collections of European and American art in the United States, which he displayed in a specially designed two-room gallery in his house on Greenwich Street in lower Manhattan. (3) The gallery was opened to the public once a week, and served as a meeting place where artists, writers, and patrons of the fine arts could become acquainted and discuss matters of mutual cultural interest. (4)

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Making his mark as a patron of both established and aspiring contemporary American artists, Reed attempted to nurture the creation of a national artistic culture as sophisticated and accomplished as that of Europe. Thomas Cole, a founder of the Hudson River school, met Reed shortly after returning in 1832 from a three-year European study trip. The meeting coincided with Reed's growing interest in American art and the completion of his house and art gallery. The following year Reed commissioned Italian Scene, Composition (Pl. II) from Cole, the first of at least ten works the artist painted for him. Based on sketches Cole made in Italy, this bucolic view of the Italian countryside, with its toppled columns and decaying ruins symbolizing the fall of Old World civilizations and the regenerative forces of nature, touched on themes Cole brought to fruition in his most significant commission for Reed, The Course of Empire, which was completed in 1836 and displayed in grand fashion around the fireplace mantel in the front room of Reed's art gallery (see Pl. VI). (5)

Cole's epic five-painting series traces the rise and fall of an imaginary civilization, exploring in a universal sense the cyclical relationship between nature and human progress and the temporality of empires past and present. Grand in concept and suffused with historical associations, moralistic narrative, and universal truths about mankind's relationship with the natural world, the series embodied Cole's ambition to raise landscape painting to an unprecedented level of importance. Indeed, the ideas inherent in the conception of the series and the approaches to landscape the paintings illuminate profoundly influenced two generations of Hudson River school painters. (6)

Another artist who flourished under Reed's patronage was Asher Brown Durand. Forsaking a successful career as an engraver, Durand took up painting in March 1835 when Reed commissioned a series of oil portraits of the first seven presidents of the United States for his gallery (see Pl. V). (7) The driving force behind the project was Reed's zeal to commemorate national figures and their achievements for posterity and his recognition of the portrait as an essential moralizing instrument. Reed commissioned portraits from life of the two living presidents, Andrew Jackson, then in office, and John Quincy Adams, and copies of the best surviving portraits of the other five by Gilbert Stuart. Once completed, the presidential portraits were installed in Reed's art gallery. Reed then had Durand paint a duplicate set of the series, which he donated to the United States Naval Lyceum in the New York (Brooklyn) Navy Yard. (8)

His interest in landscape painting and portraiture notwithstanding, Reed was also an avid collector of genre paintings depicting scenes from everyday life. His predilection for such works came just as the art form began to take firm root in the United States. (9) Given his own modest rural background, it was natural that he would find scenes of everyday farm life immensely appealing, and he eagerly sought out aspiring American artists able to accommodate his taste. One talented artist to catch his eye was William Sidney Mount, who, by the 1830s, was establishing himself as one of the country's foremost genre painters. Reed found the artist's skill at telling rural stories through precise observation and depiction of details especially engaging, prompting him to commission two paintings of rural life from the artist in 1835. Undutiful Boys (The Truant Gamblers) (Pl. IV). Mount's second painting for Reed, features young farmhands gambling in a barn on the Mount family farm in Stony Brook, Long Island. Such pictures represented for Reed the ascendance of an American art form that not only rivaled the best that Europe could produce, but also commemorated the pioneering spirit of the new nation, thereby meeting Reed's patriotic goals for his art collection. (10)