Museum accessions

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2003 by Eleanor H. Gustafson

Two eye-popping American paintings have been acquired by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. The earlier is Buffalo Hunt, by Alfred Jacob Miller, which sheds new light on his working methods. Illustrated above, the work is thought to date from soon after Miller's return from his pioneering trip to the Rocky Mountains in 1837, when the excitement of the trip and the scenes he had witnessed and captured in lively field sketches were fresh in his mind. Previously, he was believed to have simply worked the field sketches into more elaborate line and wash drawings and from these made the large romantic paintings of the West for which he has become so well known. But the discovery of this work (and another of equal quality, entitled Scene on Big Sandy River, that sold recently at auction), with its facile brushwork, tight composition, theatrical lighting, and visual immediacy, suggests an additional step in the process. Perhaps he just could not wait to translate the many drawings into the series of large paintings and so painted a few small oils as experiments or for his own pleasure. That the painting stayed in Miller's family supports such a theory. Certainly, the rendering is the most dramatic of the many variations on the theme of the buffalo hunt he executed.

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Equally stunning is Charles Herbert Moore's Hudson River, Above Catskill, one of the fullest expressions by an American painter of the Pre-Raphaelite ideals of the mid-nineteenth century. Absolutely true to nature, it transcends topographical detail to attain a visual poetry that invites contemplation, self-reflection, and spiritual enlightenment. Replete with religious symbolism (the river of life and the boat that navigates it, the rocks of ages, and the eternal evergreens, for example), the painting is also almost certainly an homage to Thomas Cole, the father of American landscape painting, and to his famous fourcanvas The Voyage of Life. In that great religious allegory, a lone boatman traverses various river-scapes representative of life, carried ever onward toward death, and, ultimately, to spiritual renewal. Moore's painting not only makes similar references, but it actually depicts a section of the Hudson River on (or very near) what had been Cole's property in Catskill, New York.

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The Bruce Museum of Arts and Science in Greenwich, Connecticut, has acquired the study illustrated at right, a preparatory sketch by Eastman Johnson for his painting The Counterfeiters of about 1853. Typical of Johnson's anecdotal genre subjects, The Counterfeiters (now in a private collection) depicts three men in a humble interior, where they are engaged in making false coins. The Bruce Museum's study depicts three possibilities for rendering the head of one of the seated men; the one at the left is the one Johnson chose. Both the study and the painting remained in the artist's possession until his death and were sold in the 1907 sale of his estate.

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In October 1890 John Singer Sargent painted portraits of three members of the Peter Chardon Brooks family at their home in West Medford, Massachusetts. The likeness of Mrs. Brooks (nee Sarah Lawrence), recently given anonymously by a group of donors to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and illustrated below, is distinguished in the painter's oeuvre by its composition. It harks back to likenesses by John Singleton Copley, an artist Sargent admired and whose work he would have encountered often during his travels in New England in 1890. Like Copley, he used classical pillars and a curtain for the background and similarly seated his well-heeled subject in a setting that bespeaks not only her place in society but also her role as an admirer and collector of fine art. The bold dashes of paint and a predominantly dark palette that dramatically highlights the sitter's face and arms, however, mark Sargent's portrait as completely contemporary. Like the other Brooks portraits, this one descended in the family until acquired by the museum, which also owns a portrait sketch of Eleanor Brooks, a daughter of Peter and Sarah Brooks.

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Preacher, poet, writer, and editor, Benjamin Tucker Tanner was one of the most significant intellectual figures in the African-American community in the nineteenth century. After graduating from Avery College and Western Theological Seminary (both in Allegheny City, which is now North Pittsburgh), he served as a pastor in and then became a leading bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the most important African-American organizations in the country at the time. Among his seven children was Henry Ossawa Tanner, who became one of the first black American artists to achieve international prominence. He painted the portrait of his father shown here when the latter was sixty-two years old, imbuing it with a sense of spirituality and inner strength that is typical of his works, many of which depict religious themes. The portrait descended to Rae Alexander-Minter, the artist's grandniece and a great-grand-daughter of the subject, who is herself an authority on Tanner the artist. It is a partial and promised gift to the Baltimore Museum of Art, which has strong holdings of African-American art. Fittingly, Bishop Tanner spent a number of years in Baltimore and nearby Frederick, Maryland.