Museum accessions

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2002 by Eleanor H. Gustafson

In the early years of the nineteenth century Baltimore was booming, a city alive with opportunities of all sorts, both commercial and social. It was home to Joshua Johnson, the first known African-American artist to earn his living as a portrait painter, who executed likenesses of the city's sea captains, shopkeepers, merchants, and prominent members of society. The Maryland Historical Society has acquired two fine examples of his work--portraits of Mary Anne Jewins and Charles Burnett. The Burnetts were married in 1792 and lived in Richmond, Virginia, until 1795 or 1798. In the latter year the first of their eight children was born in Piscataway, Maryland, where the family had a country estate. The Burnetts appear to have moved to Baltimore by 1800, when both parents first appear in city directories as tavern owners. Judging by his uniform in Johnson's portrait, Charles Burnett fought during the War of 1812. In their strong colors, direct frontal poses, and careful detailing, the Burnett likenesses are typic al of Johnson's best work. They descended in the Burnett family until acquired by the museum in honor of Stiles T. Colwill.

If the view of Asheville, North Carolina, in 1850 shown here reminds you of the work of the Hudson River school in general and of Thomas Cole in particular, you are on the right track. It was painted by Robert S. Duncanson, a great admirer of Cole's, whose fantastical trees he evidently studied with particular assiduity One of the first important African-American landscape painters, Duncanson was born in Fayette, Seneca County, New York, turned to painting after an apprenticeship as a carpenter and house painter, and subsequently moved to Mount Healthy Ohio, a town near Cincinnati, a city known for its cultural aspirations, strong antiabolitionist sympathies, and large black population. He painted portraits, copied prints of old master paintings, and then branched out into landscape painting on travels in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New England, and, farther afield, in Scotland. He made the grand tour of Europe in 1853 and came home to Cincinnati to paint romantic Italianate landscapes.

The view of Asheville is the smaller of two known versions, the other being in a private collection in Asheville. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is delighted to add the painting, its first by Duncanson, to a growing collection of historical works by African-American artists.

When Rip Van Winkle wakes up from his twenty years drunken sleep, he returns, an old man, to his village in the Catskill Mountains of New York, a moment captured in the charming painting by Tompkins Harrison Matteson illustrated at lower right, which has recently been acquired by the Allentown Art Museum in Pennsylvania Everything has changed from the world Van Winkle knew when he fell asleep before the Revolutionary War. His irksome wife and his old friends are dead, his children are grown, and no one recognizes him but one old woman, who looks at him with great disbelief, if not disapproval. George Washington's portrait has replaced that of George III on the hotel's sign, and the inn itself is now named the Union rather than the King's Arms. Painted about 1845, the picture depicts more than a moment in the story, however, for Matteson draws on contemporary themes to enrich his canvas. As a member of the so-called Knickerbocker circle of artists and writers, which included Washington Irving (Van Winkle's cre ator), James Fenimore Cooper, Thomas Cole, and Asher Brown Durand, Matteson was a promoter of nationalism at a time when the United States was in the throes of rapid westward expansion. States' rights and slavery were emerging issues, making the reference to the Union easily understandable by Matteson's audience. The nascent temperance movement, too, is suggested by the rotund whiskey jug placed prominently in the foreground. Carefully painted, the canvas is an excellent example of Matteson's early work. A later, more loosely rendered version of the scene is in the Albany Institute of History and Art.