19th century AD

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2001 by Alfred C. Harrison Jr.

Luminism was a significant aspect of landscape art in the West just as it was in the East. Wherever nature provided lakes, rivers, and ocean, painters captured their particular charm in realistic landscapes that were also deep expressions of the artists' souls.

ALFRED C. HARRISON JR. is the president of the North Point Gallery in San Francisco.

(1.) John I. H. Baur, "Early Studies in Light and Air by American Painters" Brooklyn," Museum Bulletin, vol.9, no. 2 (winter 1948), p.3; John I. H. Baur; "Trends in American Painting, 1815-1865," in M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815 to 1865 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1949), pp. xv--Ivii; and John I. H. Baur, "American Luminism, A Neglected Aspect of the Realist Movement in Nineteenth-Century American Paintings," Perspectives USA, vol.9 (Autumn 1954), pp. 90-98.

(2.) Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century (Praeger Publishers, New York, 1969), pp. 105-106, 112-113, 122; Theodore E. Stebbins Jr., The Life and Works of Martin Johnson Heade (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1975), pp. 105-110; and John Wilmerding et al., American Light: The Luminist Movement 1850-1875, Paintings, Drawings, Photographs (National Gallery of Art, washington, D.C., 1980).

(3.) San Francisco Alta California, October 29, 1874.

(4.) San Francisco Evening Post, October 27, 1874.

(5.) San Francisco Chronicle, March 22, 1870.

(6.) Alta California, June 5, 1870.

(7.) Quoted in Saint Paul Daily Pioneer, November 15, 1872. I am indebted to Michael D. Schroeder, the expert on Munger, for calling this to my attention. The citation originally appeared in Isaac Oliver Peterson, "Art in Saint Paul as Recorded in the Contemporary Newspapers" (master's thesis, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1942).

(8.) San Francisco Evening Post, December 1, 1877.

(9.) John Keats, "Ode on Melancholy," Keats, Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod (Oxford University Press, London, 1967), pp. 219-220.

(10.) The Californian, December 1881, p.26.

(11.) The Argonaut, March 15, 1879.

(12.) San Francisco Chronicle, April 11, 1886.

(13.) Ibid., April 4,1885.