American paintings, 1850-1930, in the Brauer Museum of Art, Valparaiso University

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1998 by Franklin Kelly

In 1955 Valparaiso University, in Valparaiso, Indiana, received a bequest of 382 works of American art from the estate of Percy H. Sloan (1868-1950), a Chicago art teacher. About three-quarters of the collection was comprised of paintings by his father, Junius R. Sloan (see Pls. V, VI), but works by other notable American painters were also included. Sloan also left an endowment of $150,000 to support the care of the collection and the creation of educational programs and exhibitions devoted to American art. In the years since then, the university's collection has grown to some 2,700 works of art. Parts of the collection were exhibited in various buildings on the campus until 1995, when the Valparaiso University Center for the Arts was opened. Included in the complex is a state-of-the-art museum, named the Brauer Museum of Art in 1996 to honor its long-time director and curator, Richard H. W. Brauer. The fifteen paintings highlighted in this article give a good idea of the scope and character of the museum's American holdings, which are particularly strong in works from the mid-nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth.

A recent major addition to the collection is Asher B. Durand's Classical Composition (Pl. II) of 1850. Although best known for pastoral Hudson River landscapes and scenes of quiet forest interiors, Durand also painted a number of important imaginary landscapes that recall the work of Thomas Cole (1801-1848). Durand's interest in imaginary scenes was strongest in the early 1850s, when he painted not only Classical Composition but also Landscape - Scene from "Thanatopsis" (1850, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), God's Judgment upon Gog (1852, Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia), and Progress (1853, Warner Collection of Gulf States Paper Corporation, Tuscaloosa, Alabama). Other Hudson River school painters created imaginary works about the same time - for example, in 1851 Frederic Edwin Church painted Deluge (whereabouts unknown) and Jasper E Cropsey (1823-1900) painted The Spirit of War (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) and its companion piece, The Spirit of Peace (Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia) - suggesting that there may have been a certain rivalry among those who felt they were Cole's true heirs.

Classical Composition is fascinatingly complex in its details yet lyrically evocative of arcadian beauty. Similar in composition to both Cole's Dream of Arcadia of 1838 (Denver Art Museum) and Durand's own Morning of Life, one of a pair with The Evening of Life (both 1840, National Academy Museum, New York City), Classical Composition was commissioned by John David Wolfe (1792-1872), a New York collector who also bought another Durand called The Wanderer's Home (c. 1850, whereabouts unknown). The two may have formed a pair contrasting old and new world scenery. When the Wolfe collection was sold in 1863 they were listed consecutively in the catalogue and were purchased by the same buyer for $490 apiece.(1) Lines of poetry were quoted for each. For Classical Composition (which was called Classic Italy in the catalogue) the lines were from canto IV of Byron's Childe Harold:

Thou art the garden of the World, the home Of all art yields, and nature can decree; Even in thy desert, what is like to thee? Thy very weeds are beautiful, thy waste More rich than other climes fertility.(2)

The Wanderer's Home was accompanied by lines from a poem by the British poet Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793-1835), whose works were extremely popular in the United States:

Seest thou my home! 'tis where yon woods are waving, In their dark richness, to the summer air; Where yon blue stream a thousand flower banks leaving, Leads down the hills a vein of light - 'tis there!(3)

Although documentation is lacking, it is tempting to think that The Wanderer's Home may be the painting of identical. size now known as View toward the Hudson Valley (1851, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut), which depicts a landscape similar to that described in the poem and includes two men, one of whom wears a knapsack and whose gestures direct his companion's attention to a house nestled in trees in the distance.

Frederic Edwin Church, one of America's preeminent landscape painters, is represented in the Brauer Museum by Mountain Landscape (Pl. IV), a dramatic scene of a darkly clouded landscape at sunset. It is clearly related to the artist's New England Landscape (Evening After a Storm) of about 1849 (Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas), but the exact nature of that relationship remains tantalizingly uncertain.(4) It seems unlikely that the Brauer's painting was a preliminary study for the larger work because it differs in a number of substantial ways and is larger than other compositional studies by Church. With its freely brushed areas of pigment in the sky that resemble Church's plein air sketches but a composition suggesting a studio production, Mountain Landscape provides wonderful insight into the artist's working methods. In it we see Church's efforts to unite the immediacy and vitality of his outdoor observations with the clarity and structure of a carefully organized finished painting.