That New England Esthetic

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 3, 1999 | by Stephen Goode

An amusing and eclectic exhibition at the National Museum of American Art in the nation's capital gathers together hundreds of images of New England -- in order to discover America.

Two images greet the viewer of "Picturing Old New England," the richly textured exhibition now showing at the National Museum of American Art in Washington: Daniel Chester French's Concord Minute Man of 1775 and George Henry Boughton's Pilgrims Going to Church. French's sculpture, rendered in 1889, depicts a farmer abandoning his plow for arms to fight the Revolutionary War. Boughton's painting, which dates from 1867, presents men (some armed), women and children on their way to worship services on a cold winter's day, wary of surprise attack.

Americans are familiar with both works, reproduced thousands of times, making them fitting icons for an exhibit exploring a very American theme: how artists between 1865 and 1945 created the image of New England, birthplace of principles -- individualism, order and self-control -- that shaped the United States.

But the work of art that probably best represents "Picturing Old New England" is Eastman Johnson's The Old Stage Coach, a buoyant 1871 painting of children at play on a wheel-less stagecoach. Trains had by then become the chosen mode of transportation and the forlorn coach harkens back to earlier times. Its name, "Mayflower" written above the side door, evokes an even more remote New England era. The exuberant children look ahead: They will be the future.

This is a large exhibition, and eclectic, including 173 paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs and illustrated books by artists as various as Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Grandma Moses, Marguerite Zorach and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. There are stunning photographs of New England poets such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1868) and Robert Frost (by Paul Waitt, entitled The Farmer-Poet at the Stone Cottage, 1921).

In the preface to the excellent catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, curators William H. Truettner, who is with the museum, and University of Virginia professor emeritus Roger B. Stein argue that New England was (and still is) the region to which Americans most often turn to locate the nation's past -- "a repository of ideas and values that have endured, unbroken, for almost four centuries."

But the show presents several New Englands. One is mythic and historic: Howard Pyle's dramatic wartime painting The Battle of Bunker Hill (1898), for example. There's the New England aristocracy represented by portraits of upper-class men and women and images of their elegant homes.

Photographs and paintings of fishermen and farmers at work present still another side of the region. But the most striking works in the exhibition underline the stark contrasts of New England's heritage. Winslow Homer's High Cliff, Coast of Maine (1894) makes palpable the power of nature, and N.C. Wyeth's The Island Funeral (1939) shows life's starkness (mitigated in the painting by a sense of community among the mourners). Paul Starrett Sample's happier Beaver Meadow (also from 1939), on the other hand, captures village life on a bright, sunny day.

The exhibition shows the effects of urbanization on New England (by 1875, more than half the people of Massachusetts lived in cities) and of the rise (and then decline) of industrialization. What makes this show as good as it is, however, are the works of modernists such as Marsden Hartley (his powerful landscape Mount Katahdin, Maine, 1941, and others) alongside such popular artists as Norman Rockwell (his Freedom from Want of 1943, the very familiar painting of a family at Thanksgiving Dinner).

Out of this impressive variety emerges a New England that is very much its own, particular region of America, but at the same time a place that evokes memory is each of us, even if we come from a different part of this country. "Picturing Old New England" is open through Aug. 22, and will not travel.