Museum accessions - John Singleton Copley portrait added to the Philadelphia Museum of Art collection - Brief Article

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1999 by Eleanor H. Gustafson

In a fortuitous arrangement, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has acquired an iconic Philadelphia portrait, John Singleton Copley's Portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Mifflin, from another venerable Philadelphia institution, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Fortuitous because the arrangement allows the painting to take its place among a constellation of Philadelphia masterworks at the Philadelphia Museum, while giving the historical society the where-withall to pursue its ambitious efforts to establish itself anew as an unparalleled special collections library with vast holdings of archival manuscripts and works on paper.

Immediately admired and considered one of Copley's greatest works, the portrait depicts Thomas (1744 - 1800) and Sarah Morris Mifflin (17477-1790), leaders in Philadelphia's social, political, and cultural life. Copley's only likeness of Philadelphia sitters, the painting descended in the Morris family to Esther F. Wistar, who bequeathed it to the historical society in 1900.

The board game Masterpiece and the Internet were keys to identifying Magnolias on Gold Velvet Cloth, a previously unknown painting by Martin Johnson Heade. The former owner happened upon an image of a similar work by Heade while playing Masterpiece, and used the Internet to find the experts who could confirm his discovery. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, has now acquired this important painting, its first work by Heade and an ornament to its already fine holdings of American still lifes. Retaining its original frame and long kept under glass, Magnolias is in remarkable condition, the colors vivid and the textures almost palpable. Heade was a versatile artist who painted in many genres (see p. 558), but he is best known for his landscapes and his still lifes of tropical flowers. This oil on canvas is the seventeenth known of reclining magnolias. Exuding sensuality and an air of mystery, they received little critical attention when they were painted but can be seen today as representing the apogee of still-life painting in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century.

The Art Museum of Western Virginia, in Roanoke, has recently acquired Frederick Childe Hassam's Across the Park as a gift from the Horace G. Fralin Charitable Trust, which has made possible the acquisition of a number of other American works over the past few years. As in many of his views of New York City, in Across the Park Hassam juxtaposes the "old" New York, represented by the horse-drawn carriage and the humble tiding stable amongst the trees, with the high-rise buildings heralding the modern age in the distance. The view, looking east across Central Park from Hassam's studio on West Sixty-seventh Street, is the same one he pictured in the winter scene entitled The Hovel and the Skyscraper, 1904 (collection of Mr. and Mrs. Meyer P. Potamkin), in which the steel frame of a new building rises in the foreground, making an even stronger statement about urban growth. As Ulrich W. Hiesinger observed in comparing the two works: "Hassam manipulates the same material to very different ends, producing here an idyllic, almost pastoral image of the city. Reality, [he] maintained, was always subordinate to the artist's judgment."

The landscape painter David Wilson Jordan was perhaps more successful as the subject of artworks than as their creator. He was portrayed by, among others, Thomas Pollock Anshutz (Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence) and by the sculptor Samuel Murray (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia), but most importantly he was painted by his friend and former teacher Thomas Eakins, whose penetrating likeness of him has recently been acquired by the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens. Executed in 1899, the portrait shows Jordan against an ambiguous, dark background painted with the same loose brushwork as his clothes, setting off the more detailed and carefully rendered face, which allows a more intimate connection with him. Jordan kept the portrait until his death, along with Eakins's 1888 likeness of Jordan's sister Letitia Wilson Jordan (Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York City).