Nineteenth-century American paintings

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2005 by Lee A. Vedder

(6) For recent interpretive studies of The Course of Empire, see Rebecca Bedell, The Anatomy of Nature: Geology and American Landscape Painting, 1825-1875 (Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2001), pp. 33-41; Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer, American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820-1880 (Tate Publishing, London, 2002), pp. 95-109; Christine Stansell et al., Thomas Cole: Landscape into History, ed. William H. Truettner and Alan Wallach (Yale University Press, New Haven, in association with the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C., 1994), pp. 23-111; and Angela L. Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825-1875 (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1993), pp. 137-165.

(7) Asher Brown Durand was a talented and successful engraver of banknotes, book and magazine illustrations, and prints of such well-known paintings as John Trumbull's Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776 (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven) of 1786-1794, in which he captured the faces of several future presidents.

(8) The original commission also included a portrait of Martha Washington (1732-1802) copied from a Gilbert Stuart original. This was omitted from the series Durand painted for the United States Naval Lyceum. See Foshay, Mr. Luman Reed's Picture Gallery, pp. 61-63, 141-145. The duplicate set of the series is now in the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

(9) The earliest American genre paintings, including those dating from the 1830s, were focused on rural and frontier life. These works showed Americans engaged in farming, sewing, hunting, skating, relaxing, and socializing. Virtually any occasion or setting served as subject matter. The most compelling and persuasive history of American genre painting of the antebellum period remains Elizabeth Johns, American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1991).

(10) William Sidney Mount's first painting for Reed was Farmer's Bargaining, also known as Bargaining for a Horse (1835). For a discussion of Reed's interest in genre painting, including the door panels he commissioned for his gallery from Cole, Durand, Mount, and George Whiting Flagg (1816-1897), see Foshay, Mr. Luman Reed's Picture Gallery, pp. 63-68, 167-70, 119-20, and 222. For a recent study of Mount's career as a genre painter, see Deborah J. Johnson, William Sidney Mount: Painter of American Life (American Federation of Arts, New York, 1998).

(11) Reed to Durand, June 18, 1835 (Asher Brown Durand Papers, New York Public Library, New York City); quoted in Foshay, Mr. Luman Reed's Picture Gallery, p. 127.

(12) For the history of the New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts and its donation to the New-York Historical Society, see Abigail Booth Gerdts, "Newly Discovered Records of the New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts," Archives of American Art Journal, vol. 21, no. 4 (1981), pp. 1-9; and Maybelle Mann, "The New-York Gallery of [the] Fine Arts: 'A Source of Refinement,'" American Art Journal, vol. 11 (January 1979), pp. 76-86. See also Foshay, Mr. Luman Reed's Picture Gallery, pp. 19-22.