The John Wilmerding collection: a scholar's gift to the National Gallery of Art

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2004 by Nancy K. Anderson

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In 1973, a decade before the Peto exhibition, Wilmerding had acquired Take Your Choice (Pl. VIII), a superb example of Peto's seemingly jumbled yet architecturally structured still-life studies of books. As Wilmerding noted in the catalogue for the exhibition, Peto's paintings of books are metaphorically rich:

A shelf of worn volumes bespoke the pleasures of constant reading--the
old masters made familiar. Within these broken bindings and frayed pages
reposed the muse of literature. Peto's books stand as embodiments of
culture as diverse as the shapes and colors of the volumes themselves.
For him books were more than inert things lying around on tables or
shelves; they were unexpected but accessible incarnations of art. (5)

When able to escape curatorial and administrative duties (and Washington's oppressive summer heat), Wilmerding retreated to Mount Desert Island on the Northern coast of Maine, where he was able to write without interruption. It is not surprising, therefore, that his collection reflects a long-standing interest in a host of nineteenth-century artists who also found inspiration in Maine's rugged scenery. Two paintings of coastal Maine by Church are included in the Wilmerding gift: Newport Mountain, Mount Desert (1851), an early studio painting, and Fog off Mount Desert (Pl. X), the first oil sketch by the artist to enter the museum's collection.

In the summer of 1850 Church set out on the first of many trips to Mount Desert, following in the footsteps of his teacher, Thomas Cole (1801-1848). Letters he wrote from there, later published in the Bulletin of the American Art-Union, confirm that Church completed numerous drawings of coastal scenery and several plein-air oil sketches on his initial trip, including Fog off Mount Desert. In his book-length study of American artists who journeyed to Maine, Wilmerding aptly described Church's oil sketch as a "marvel of vision and execution, nearly effortlessly fusing immediate and intimate facts with grander forces." (6) These two paintings of North American subjects join El Rio de Luz (The River of Light) of 1877, an impressive South American landscape already at the National Gallery.

Also included among the renditions of Mount Desert is a suite of early drawings by William Stanley Haseltine, who traveled to the island in 1859, shortly after returning from Italy where he had completed many drawings of the dramatic rock formations near Capri. Hoping to find equally inspiring American subjects, Haseltine spent several weeks sketching along the coast of Maine. Four drawings from this trip are part of the Wilmerding gift, including Thunder Hole, Mount Desert Island (Pl. IX), a remarkable study of the faceted rocks that define one of the island's most distinctive formations. Praised by his contemporaries for the geologic precision of his drawings, these early works represent the young artist at his best.

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In 1866 Haseltine returned to Europe, where he remained for nearly thirty years. However, in the spring of 1893, and again in 1895, he visited the United States, and on both trips he traveled to Mount Desert. By the 1890s, the island had become one of the most fashionable resorts on the East Coast. Palatial "cottages" built by Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Morgans, and Astors had begun to dot the landscape.