A selection of European paintings and objects

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2005 by Roberta J.M. Olson

Through selected European objects in the collection of the New-York Historical Society one can chart the aspirations and taste of the citizens of New Netherland and then of New Yorkers. In an assertion of identity and then a quest for sophistication, early Americans turned to a succession of models that reveal how America saw itself: as an outpost of European culture, as a young nation, and finally as a wealthy and powerful country bent on cultural competition with Europe. Since newcomers established colonies in imitation of their homelands, their taste was inherently conservative, broadening only with time and travel. (1)

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Dutch merchants laid claim to the territory they called New Netherland, formally establishing it under a charter granted to the Dutch West India Company in 1621. Under the rule of Peter Stuyvesant from 1647 to 1664, the colony prospered and a babble of eighteen languages enlivened a melting pot in which the Dutch mingled with other colonists. (2) Prosperous Dutch settlers imported fine art resonant of the golden age of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) and Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), as wills and inventories confirm. (3) A case in point is the portrait of Anna Stuyvesant Bayard and her husband, Samuel (Pl. VI). After Samuel Bayard's death about 1650, Anna, the sister of Peter Stuyvesant, joined her brother in New Netherland, presumably bringing this painting with her. Similarly, the walnut kas shown on page 143, Pl. VII, suggests the richness of imported Dutch furniture. (4)

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Gradually Dutch immigrant craftsmen began producing objects in the New World. An early example is the stained-glass window attributed to Evert Duyckinck I (Pl. VIII), who arrived in 1638 with the Dutch West India Company and established America's first artistic dynasty. (5) One of the society's earliest artifacts, the window once graced the first Dutch Reformed Church in Albany. (6) During the seventeenth century heraldic windows adorned the naves of Dutch Reform churches, a custom dating back several centuries in the Netherlands. Wealthy burghers who generously supported their local houses of worship would have their coats of arms painted on glass for display in the church.

The strife between the Dutch and ascendant English interests reached a crescendo in New Netherland in 1664, when the English took possession of New Amsterdam (population ten thousand) and the city and colony were renamed New York. At first, the rights of the Dutch were maintained, and many prominent families, such as the De Peysters, who were descendants of Dutch patroons, continued to be a cultural, mercantile, and political force. Nevertheless, the taste for things English rivaled and soon eclipsed Dutch hegemony.

In the 1730s, the grandson of Evert Duyckinck, Gerardus Duyckinck, portrayed a De Peyster youth (Pl. V) with more English than Dutch stylistic elements. The portrait is modeled on an English mezzotint of 1701 by John Smith (c. 1654-1742/3) after a painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller (1646-1723) of Richard Boyle (later Lord Clifford) and his sister Lady Jane. (7) Like other formulaic childrens' portraits with animals based on English models, which were popular with painters working for prominent families in the Hudson River valley and Manhattan, the portrait of De Peyster was also indebted to the Dutch emblematic tradition. (8) A symbol of fidelity, the dog responds to the future lord of the domain, who gestures toward the interior of the house. The landscape alludes to the garden of love and the family's continuance (the lion's head of the fountain being an emblematic reference to love), and also advertises the De Peysters' prosperity and status. Similarly, English models, frequently via pattern books, became fashionable for furniture, as, for example, the dressing table after a design by Thomas Sheraton shown on page 163, Pl. III. (9)

When the New Yorker Cornelia Dickenson (1744-1816) married Hendrick Remsen Jr. (1736-1792) in 1761, she received a silver-gilt chatelaine as a present (Pl. II). (10) Chatelaines had been worn by both men and women on the Continent since the Renaissance, although they were most often worn by women as an indication of their status in the household, thus making a chatelaine a fitting wedding present. The most intimate of the charms adorning Cornelia Remsen's chatelaine is a miniature of her son John Henry, who succumbed to yellow fever, the most feared epidemic of the period.

Commerce and the hope of profits soon beckoned American merchants into international markets, which expanded their taste and their definition of sophistication. Although the Dutch were early importers of Chinese objects, it was the British, with their passion for porcelain and tea, who supplied New Yorkers with Chinese export porcelain. (11) When the American ship Empress of China returned to New York from Canton in 1785, it inaugurated direct trade between the two nations. Samuel Shaw of Boston, the first American consul at Canton, managed the sale of the ship's cargo and commissioned a tea and chocolate service decorated with the insignia of the Society of the Cincinnati (see Pl. VII). (12)