Museum accessions

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1995 by Gustafson. Eleanor H.

The Philadelphia merchant Thomas Pym Cope (1768-1854) established the first regular line of packet ships between that city and Liverpool, England, making himself a fortune and enabling him to become one of Philadelphia's great philanthropists. He gave his name to the packet depicted here, the Thomas P. Cope, which was launched on April 5, 1839, and made twenty-one round-trip voyages between Philadelphia and Liverpool. On one of them it brought to Philadelphia the young Edward Moran, who painted the canvas. Executed about 1860 and displayed the following year at the annual exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the painting was then owned by the collector Joseph William Bates, who served on the board of the Pennsylvania Academy from 1875 until his death in 1886. The painting depicts the ship in the choppy waters of the mighty Delaware River, the maritime history of which is the focus of the collection of the Independence Seaport Museum. The museum recently acquired the painting through the generosity of Thomas Cope's great-great-great grandson.

Crippled by diabetes, Charles Demuth spent the last years of his life in his native Lancaster, Pennsylvania, an unwilling captive in a town that, ironically, provided him with some of his greatest inspiration. The pictures he created there between 1927 and 1933 were not intended to form, in the words of Barbara Haskell, "a likeness of the city," but instead "a means through which to record his times and his response to them" (Charles Demuth [Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City], p. 193). One of these late works, Chimney and Water Tower, has been acquired by the Amon Carter Museum. By means of a carefully constructed pattern of lines, planes, angles, and colors, the painting achieves a sense of solidity and monumentality. Demuth bequeathed it to his close friend and fellow modernist Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) and it became part of the collection formed by her husband, Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946).

The Washington County Museum of Fine Arts in Hagerstown, Maryland, has been given a pair of portraits by Joshua Johnson, one of the first recognized black artists in America. The subjects are Benjamin Franklin Yoe, a tailor, and his wife, Susanna Amos Yoe, who are shown, respectively, with Benjamin Franklin Jr. and Mary Elizabeth, their children. They were painted in Baltimore in 1809, the year before the family moved to Hagerstown. As is often the case in Johnson's portraits, the children hold flowers - Mary Elizabeth five roses and Benjamin Franklin Jr. a single rose. Another familiar feature is the sofa in which Susanna Yoe is posed. It is bordered with the brass-headed tacks that gave rise to Johnson's identification as the "brass tack" artist.

The formidable man shown below is Captain Moses Owen of Bath, Maine, as rendered by James Peale, the brother of Charles Willson Peale. It was painted in 1822 and after descending through the Owen, Ledyard, and Baecker families of Bath and Brunswick, Maine, it was recently bought for the Maine Maritime Museum by Elizabeth B. Noyce, a prominent philanthropist in the state. Captain Owen's commands included the Bath-built snows Clarissa Ann aud Minerva. The museum has the carved figurehead from the former and a painting of the latter executed about 1810. The figurehead is the oldest surviving one from a Maine-built ship, just as the painting is the earliest representation of a Bath-built vessel in the museum.