John Ross Key's world's fair paintings

Magazine Antiques, March, 2004 by Alfred C. Harrison, Jr.

Another large painting from the Buffalo series draws on Key's ability to capture reflections in water. Delaware Park Lake with Casino (Pl. VIII) shows an expanse of still water in the foreground giving way to the casino with its orange tile roof in the middle ground and the formidable Albright Art Gallery (now the Albright-Knox Art Gallery), veiled by a mist of atmospheric perspective, in the distance. Warm harmonies of orange and green permeate the scene and give it a poetic quality that no photograph could project. A third work depicting the Midway (Pl. VII) captures the light-hearted architecture of the less pretentious section of the fair with its circus atmosphere that includes a parade of camels and costumed dervishes mingling with the sturdy middle-class American fairgoers. The building with the sphinx and obelisks in the center housed Akoun's Beautiful Orient with its bazaar offering wares from the Middle East. The strange structure in the shape of a human face at the left housed Dreamland, where visitors were asked to negotiate a maze of mirrors.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The last world's fair Key recorded on canvas was the spectacular Louisiana Purchase Exposition held in Saint Louis from May to November 1904. Unlike his freelance status at Chicago and Buffalo, Key seems to have been connected to this exposition's management, at least unofficially, and he seems also to have arranged to have a local newspaper, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, commission several works that were reproduced in its Sunday supplements, beginning in May. Key must have arrived in Saint Louis long before the opening of the show because by February 1904 he had already completed seventeen paintings of the fair, which he carried to Washington, D.C., in an effort to persuade Congress to loan the fair's management $4 million. (16)

The Saint Louis fair was created to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase. Its ambitious directors succeeded in constructing an exposition that was bigger and more impressive than its predecessors. The mixture of conservative architectural styles contributed to the theme of international peace and cooperation. Positioned on a hilltop at the end of a body of water called the Grand Basin, the fair's central building, Festival Hall, resembled the top half of the Capitol in Washington with its two-hundred-foot-high dome. A major landmark of the show was the Louisiana Purchase Monument, a hundred-foot-high column surmounted with an allegorical figure of Peace carrying a torch to the nations of the world. (17)

On May 1, 1904, the magazine section of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat ran a large illustration "after a painting by John R. Key" entitled The Exposition on Opening Day. This was a view of Festival Hall from the Louisiana Purchase Monument, with the walkways crowded with fairgoers. (18) This illustration portrayed a scene almost identical to Key's large painting Looking South towards Festival Hall (Pl. IX), which the exposition company purchased from the artist. It shows the architectural center of the fair on an almost cloudless day, allowing Key to demonstrate the contrast between the ivory-colored buildings, a powder blue sky, and its reflection in the basin. The parade of elephants and camels, gondolas in the lagoon, pennants and flags--embellishments also found in Key's other paintings of fairs--give a sense of exuberance to a scene dominated by classical architecture.