Nineteenth-century American paintings

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2005 by Lee A. Vedder

Stuart's interest in landscape paintings was more than matched by his attraction to genre scenes, which made up about half of his painting collection. Many of the genre paintings were devoted to popular themes of the day--children, education, romance, and labor. Religious genre subjects and history-inspired works, including George Henry Boughton's Pilgrims Going to Church (Pl. XIII), appealed to Stuart as well, for his Presbyterian faith was a significant factor in his philanthropic largesse. (21) One of the most intriguing aspects of his collecting of genre painting was his interest in African-American subjects, most notably his purchase in 1868 of Eastman Johnson's canonical Negro Life at the South (Pl. XII), for which he paid six thousand dollars, more than twice what he had paid for any work in his collection up to that point. (22)

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Following Stuart's death in 1882, his widow, Mary McCrea Stuart (1810-1891), devoted herself to shaping her husband's legacy. She donated the art collection to the Lenox Library, which eventually became the New York Public Library. In 1911 the collection was placed on view in a third-floor gallery at the new public library building at Forty-second Street. By 1944, however, the library, with its growing collection of books, could no longer maintain a substantial art collection and placed nearly 250 of Stuart's paintings on permanent loan at the New-York Historical Society, where they reside today. (23)

In addition to housing the Reed, Bryan, and Stuart collections, the society is unsurpassed anywhere for its holdings of works by Durand, most of them donated by the artist's family between 1903 and 1935. The collection comprises more than five hundred catalogued artworks, including landscape paintings, portraits, historical and genre scenes, plein-air oil sketches, drawings, sketchbooks, photographs, and an extensive collection of the artist's engravings. Indeed, nowhere else is the trajectory of Durand's career, especially his achievement as a landscape painter, represented more comprehensively. (24) His close friendship with Cole, whose encouragement inspired him to pursue his true calling as a painter of the American landscape, is immortalized in Cole's Study for "Dream of Arcadia," a trompe-l'oeil oil sketch Cole executed as a painting lesson for Durand and presented to him in 1838 (Pl. XI). (25) Other highlights of the Durand collection include large-scale easel paintings ranging in subject from The Solitary Oak (The Old Oak) (Pl. XV), an idealized view of rural life in the east painted in 1844, to more empirical representations of well-known natural landmarks such as Black Mountain from the Harbor Islands, Lake George, New York (Pl. X), which Durand painted at the age of seventy-nine, eleven years before his death. The collection also encompasses a vast treasury of very detailed nature studies that Durand executed in both oil and graphite throughout his career while exploring the forests and mountains of upstate New York and New England. In these studies (see Pl. XIV) meticulous renderings of rocks, dense undergrowth, and the intricate foliage, trunks, and root structures of trees assume a commanding presence, revealing Durand's desire to study and record nature's particulars with a clear, reverent eye and to capture the grandeur and "lessons of high and holy meaning" (26) inherent in their structure. It was this distinct vision of nature, born of devout empiricism and precise recording, that set Durand apart from his mentor Cole and inspired a second generation of Hudson River school artists. (27)