The Hudson River School at the New-York Historical Society: Nature and the American Vision
(above: John Frederick Kensett (1816-1872), Shrewsbury River, New Jersey, 1859, oil on canvas. The Robert L. Stuart Collection, Stuart 229)
Exhibition Section Panels:
Introduction
This exhibition showcases the extraordinary depth and richness of the New-York Historical Society's landscape collections, including works on paper, decorative arts, and, especially, paintings by artists of the Hudson River School. Rising to eminence in New York during the mid-nineteenth century, this loosely knit group of artists, together with like-minded poets and writers, forged a self-consciously "American" landscape vision and literary voice. Both were grounded in the exploration of the natural world as a resource for spiritual renewal and as an expression of cultural and national identity.
The Hudson River and the natural wonders along its banks had a long history of associations with earlier inhabitants, including Native Americans, the Dutch, and the British. Key battles of the American Revolution were fought along the river's course. Such historical associations amid the evocative terrain of the Catskills, Adirondacks, and White Mountains enriched regional sites throughout the Hudson River Valley, producing homegrown schools of painting and literature grounded in its scenery and history. After 1850 Hudson River School artists also sought inspiration further from home, enlisting their artistic vision to capture experiences in such far-flung places as the Yosemite Valley, the Arctic, and the Andes.
The paintings in the exhibition are organized around themes that illuminate the sites that drew both artists and travelers. Other themes investigate landscape imagery as a powerful narrative device that embodied ideas about nature and culture. Works on paper recording the scenery that established visual models and a landscape itinerary for later generations of artists and travelers are exhibited in the Luman Reed Galleries. Also on view there is a selection of works from the Society's holdings that explore the history of art collecting in nineteenth-century New York and the rise of genre painting as another of America's preeminent art forms.
City on a River: New York
The majestic Hudson River originates high in the Adirondacks, flowing between rocky crags and wooded peaks some 315 miles to the sea. Navigable as far as Albany, the Hudson was a strategic military and commercial waterway commanded over the centuries in turn by Native Americans, by the Dutch, and then by the English until the American Revolution. In 1626 the Dutch purchased Manhattan Island from Native American inhabitants as a trading post, called New Amsterdam, at the mouth of the Hudson. Ceded to the British in 1664 and renamed New York, the city was later claimed by newly independent Americans in 1783. The huge natural harbor opening onto the Atlantic was developed into the Port of New York, the primary source for the mercantile wealth of the city. In 1825 the Hudson River was linked to the Great Lakes by the Erie Canal, a manmade waterway between Albany and Buffalo. This busy commercial route linked the Port of New York to the interior of the continent, accelerating the growth of New York City into a booming cosmopolitan metropolis.
Urban populations developed a taste for regional landscape subjects linked to picturesque touring routes along the river, a market served first by printmakers and then by artists of the Hudson River School. Many artists also painted images of New York itself, works that celebrated the city's spectacular physical setting and its watery surroundings. Images of New York City also gained wide circulation in prints and reproductions on decorated dinner services (displayed nearby) that were popular with American and British consumers.
On the River: Travel & Touring
The success in 1807 of Robert Fulton's steamboat, the Clermont, set the stage for commercial steam-driven river navigation on the Hudson from New York City to Albany. The waterway was extended to the Great Lakes in 1825 with completion of the Erie Canal, vital for both the transportation of raw materials and the development of the new industry of tourism. The sidewheel steamboats that carried much of the river's commercial and passenger traffic were celebrated as marvels of modern technology. Called "floating palaces," they offered speedy travel and luxurious accommodations.
The Hudson River Portfolio, a set of landscape prints published between 1821 and 1825 showing views of twenty significant sites along the river's course, demonstrates how quickly a picturesque touring itinerary was joined to the commercial traffic that plied the river. The Hudson also served as the gateway to other regions celebrated for their scenic beauty and historic sites. These included the Catskill and Adirondack mountain ranges as well as Lake George; all were touring destinations as well as primary sketching grounds for American landscape painters. The Erie Canal provided an extended route to Niagara Falls, while the chain of lakes bordering the Adirondacks offered a waterway north to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, sites and regions also celebrated in paintings of the Hudson River School. The foldout portions of two famous Hudson River guides that chart the river's course as a picturesque touring route are also reproduced here in a greatly enlarged format.
American Scenic Views on Staffordshire Pottery
Paintings by Hudson River School artists and the engravings made after them were indispensable artistic sources for potters in the Staffordshire region of England, who employed the technique of transfer printing to disseminate these views to a broad middle-class American market. With the lifting of trade embargoes after the War of 1812, Staffordshire potters were eager to resume commerce with the United States and recognized that views of the country's natural wonders would appeal to American consumers' growing national pride. Publications like The Hudson River Portfolio (182125) and engravings after Hudson River School artists were freely appropriated and adapted to decorate mass-produced Staffordshire pottery.
Transfer printing was developed in England in the mid-eighteenth century, and printing in blue under the glaze was employed by the early nineteenth century. Views were engraved on a copper plate which was then heated and inked. The design was transferred to paper, which was in turn transferred to the piece of earthenware. The pottery was allowed to dry, dipped in a glaze, and fired in a kiln. Transfer prints in deep blue dominated during the 1820s, but technological improvements in printing during the 1830s and 1840s led to cleaner, sharper images and a wider range of colors. Plates and platters predominated, as printing on a flat surface was much simpler than transferring an image to a rounded form. However, American consumers enjoyed Hudson River scenery on forms as diverse as saltshakers and soup tureens. Moderately-priced Staffordshire wares offered an affordable yet attractive alternative to expensive porcelains.
Grand Landscape Narratives:
Thomas Cole's Course of Empire
The guiding theme for this series-the cyclical pattern of history-took root around 1829 during Cole's first European sojourn, a trip that essentially took him to his own past, inasmuch as he had spent his first eighteen years in his native England. The project was finally begun in earnest with the 1833 commission by the New York merchant Luman Reed, who died before its completion in 1836.
By 1833 Cole already had a reputation as one of the country's most innovative landscape painters, and it may be argued that at that moment he was the only American painter equipped to manage the technical and intellectual apparatus required to create a complex visual epic of this magnitude. The artist elaborated his theme through the orchestration of established landscape aesthetics, art historical precedent, and literary sources, all of which were unified by the device of showing the same landscape through successive eras whose temporal passage is communicated according to the times of day and seasons depicted in each of the five canvases.
The Course of Empire was essentially generic in its presentation of a dominant theory of history-that all societies were subject to the same inevitable rhythms of growth and decay. A more specific allegorical reading suggested itself to Cole's audience in 1836, however, leaving open the question of whether or not the United States would follow in the course of the empires that had gone before or break the pattern and avoid extinction.
The Old World
Nineteenth-century American artists were consistently pressed to reconcile the tensions created by the need to work within the grand cultural traditions of Europe and to forge an art that would reflect their position as aesthetic competitors in a developing, independent nation. In the first decades of the nineteenth century European travel was considered a requisite to the formation of professionalism in the United States, where an academic art system, notable art collections, and even a viable art market were lacking. Italy was the principal destination on the Grand Tour for Europeans as well as North Americans who wished to educate their minds and train their eyes according to the tastes that denoted cultured society. Viewed as the storehouse of Western culture, Italy was a living laboratory of the past, with its cities, galleries, and countryside offering a visible survey of artistic heritage from antiquity to the present.
Despite its attractions, the cultural landscape of Europe conjured faded glories, seemingly demonstrating the truth of the cyclical construct of history according to which civilizations were born, prospered, and died. Such sentiments are proved by Thomas Cole's use of lines by the English poet Samuel Rogers in conjunction with the display of Italian Scene. Composition, a painting on view here:
Night & Day: Cycles & Seasons
The works displayed here give visual testimony to Cole's belief in the suggestive power of diurnal and seasonal imagery. Picturing these commonly experienced, ever-repeating natural rhythms was an important component in the process of endowing landscape with narrative content to signal the passage of time and create an emotional response. The potent, universally understood associations that accompanied these cyclical changes gathered added meaning depending on the specific literary, religious, historical, national, or regional details that contributed to the content of individual paintings.
The American Grand Tour:
The Catskills
The taste for picturesque touring itineraries, with its supporting literature and print images, was transported to the United States from England and was well established by the early nineteenth century to serve mostly urban educated populations. By the 1820s, local and national pride had stimulated the development of an American Grand Tour celebrating a medley of landscape sites for their picturesque qualities. Waterfalls, rapids, and mills were also hailed as industrial resources. Some sites were further enriched by historical and literary associations. These developments were part of the larger quest among newly independent Americans for cultural autonomy in reaction to a reverence for European traditions that cast American society and culture as provincial. The magnificent scenery of North America was perceived as a source of national pride. Thomas Cole stated an artistic declaration of independence in 1835 with his proud claim that "[A]ll nature here is new to Art".
The Catskill Mountain region, some one hundred miles north of New York City, had first been celebrated in literature, notably Washington Irving's Rip van Winkle (1819) and James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers (1823). Easily reached from Catskill Village, where the steamboat landed, the Catskills soon joined Niagara Falls and Saratoga Springs as a popular area for both artists and tourists. Thomas Cole made his first sketching expedition to the Catskills in 1825. The paintings he made from those sketches launched not only his own career but the Hudson River School as well.
The American Grand Tour:
Lake George and the Adirondack Mountains
Named by the British in honor of their king, Lake George was long known in literature and lore by its earlier names. Native Americans called it "tail of the lake," to the French it was the "lake of St. Sacrament," and James Fenimore Cooper dubbed it "Horican" in The Last of the Mohicans (1826). Contested by the French and the English for more than two centuries, this glacially formed lake, joining Lake Champlain at the eastern edge of the Adirondack range, was one of the early scenic attractions in northern New York State. Thomas Jefferson called Lake George "the most beautiful water I ever saw." Later visitors, including many landscape painters, reached this popular resort area via steamer up the Hudson to Albany, completing the journey by rail and stage.
Lakes George and Champlain also provided a route to the Adirondacks, where heavily glaciated and forested terrain formed an even more dramatic mountain landscape than the Catskills. Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand were among the earliest artist visitors in the 1830s. Although remote for centuries, by the mid-nineteenth century the Adirondack region had also been co-opted into an artist, tourist and sportsmen's destination. During the Gilded Age, wealthy industrialists built elaborate compounds known as the Great Camps, some of which are preserved today as historic sites. In the 1880s, preservation efforts were launched to contain regional mining and logging in order to ensure that the Adirondack Park would remain "forever wild."
The American Grand Tour:
The White Mountains
The White Mountains, located in the center of New Hampshire and named for their rocky whitened peaks rising above the timberline, contain the highest peaks in the Northeast in the Presidential Range. The highest is Mount Washington, surrounded by Mounts Adams, Jefferson, Monroe, and Madison. National significance was conferred on the region by this association with the Founding Fathers, while Mount Chocorua was named for a legendary Indian chief. A remote wilderness at the beginning of the nineteenth century, these mountains, valleys, and lakes became a well-cultivated tourist destination, celebrated in both art and literature, in the last decades of the century. Some hardy visitors, however, were drawn to the region's spectacular scenery much earlier. Thomas Cole's first sketching expeditions took place in 1827 and 1828. Other landscape painters followed, and during the 1850s popular artists' summer colonies developed in and around the villages of North Conway and West Campton. A famous guidebook of 1856 took note of the artist influx to paint the majestic vista of Mount Washington: "One who visits the Conway meadows, sees the original of half of the pictures that have been shown in our art-rooms in the last two years. All our landscape painters must try their hand at that perfect gem of New England scenery."
The American Grand Tour:
Niagara Falls
The Niagara River on its course from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario plunges over cliffs down some 170 feet to create Niagara Falls, one of the world's greatest natural spectacles. Three sets of falls straddle the border between New York State and Canada. The American and Bridal Veil Falls are on the American side, and the extensive Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side. The earliest engraved image, of 1697, focused on the amazing features of height, breadth, and the sheer power of falling water that have continued to compel artists and visitors to the site for more than three centuries to contemplate the falls as a sublime spectacle evoking a rich medley of poetic, religious, and national associations.
The same attributes, moreover, that made Niagara Falls one of the earliest and most popular touring and artist destinations also generated the early development of the site as an industrial center as the river's energy was harnessed to power factories and mills. In the 1870s, a commission was created to buy back commercially developed land around the falls to be incorporated into a state park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the creator of New York City's Central Park. The commission's report included a sentiment embraced by generations of American landscape painters and is widely believed today: "Free enjoyment of these noblest works of nature is now felt to be one of man's most precious privileges, not to be abridged by private rights or greed for gain."
The American Grand Tour:
River Views and Rural Retreats
The Hudson River Valley and the surrounding region figured prominently in the literary and poetic imagination of the young nation. The combination of historic, picturesque, and literary associations established the river itself as a tourist destination and an icon of the Hudson River School, with its varied scenery, weather, and effects of light. The Tappan Zee, a wide stretch of the river between Westchester County on the east side and Rockland County on the west, often figures in their paintings. "Tappan" is the Indian word for cold springs, and "zee" is Dutch for "sea." Not far north are the Highlands, the most dramatic passage in the Hudson's course as a series of mountainsides plunge into the river channel. A favorite subject recorded by artists from many different vantage points, the Highlands are also resonant with historical associations such as the site of the United States Military Academy at West Point.
Many of the old towns and villages along the river also provided picturesque subjects and places of residence for artists, among them Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, and Jasper Cropsey. The riverside estates of wealthy families as well as country retreats for middle-class New Yorkers were reached with increasing ease of travel by steamboat and, after 1851, by railroad.
The American Grand Tour:
Artists Afield and Abroad
Reverence for nature and detailed treatment of landscape subjects were not confined to the traditional sketching grounds of the Hudson River School. Paintings are displayed here whose subjects are drawn from nearby New Jersey and Pennsylvania as well as from the geological marvels of more remote Kentucky. Some artists, however, were not content to explore and record subjects drawn from the scenery of the eastern seaboard. They shared in the popular excitement of a midcentury era of exploration and expansion that would accelerate after the Civil War. The transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869. Manifest Destiny, the philosophy that justified extending settlement across the territories west of the Mississippi River, drove the political policy of the day. Scientific and railroad surveys charted new territories and documented major discoveries in the fields of geology and paleontology.
Adventurous landscape painters responded to the expansionist and scientific impulses of the times, especially Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt, who embraced the role of artist-explorer and traveled much farther abroad, to South America and the Far West, in quest of exciting and exotic subject matter. William Bradford voyaged far and away to record the icy spectacle of the Arctic region. The popular appetite for such imagery was huge and often served by what were called "Great Pictures." These are large panoramic canvases, like the paintings by Bierstadt and Hill displayed nearby, that were often exhibited in theatrical settings to which audiences paid admission. Church and Bierstadt were the American masters of such landscape enterprises.
The American Grand Tour:
The Arctic
The vast regions known as the Arctic, lying at the highest latitudes of North America, were a source of fascination throughout the nineteenth century, not only for explorers and scientists but also for the general public. For centuries, the search for a Northwest Passage had driven European explorers to seek a direct sea route to the Far East from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. The English navigator and explorer Henry Hudson made four voyages on this quest between 1607 and 16ll. On the third voyage, under Dutch colors, he discovered the Hudson River. By the nineteenth century, the goal was more to solve a geographical problem and document glacial action than to find a commercially feasible route to the Far East. The final in this series of exploratory voyages ended in the tragedy of Sir John Franklin, who sailed from England in May 1845. His ships were wrecked and the expedition perished. When he did not return, nearly forty search parties were sent out, including two American-sponsored expeditions. The fate of the Franklin expedition evoked a strong popular response.
Artists were also inspired by accounts of polar exploration. Both Frederic Church and William Bradford voyaged north to Labrador seeking subjects. In 1861 Church's enormous painting The Icebergs (The Dallas Museum of Fine Arts) caused a sensation in New York. That year William Bradford made the first of six voyages to the coast of Labrador and specialized in Arctic subjects from then on, publishing in 1873 a volume of photographs titled The Arctic Regions.
The Frontier
In 1893 the historian Frederick Jackson Turner (18611932) summarized the idea of the American frontier as "an imaginary westward-moving line" that marked the division between "civilization and savagery." Although Turner focused primarily on the westward advance of Anglo-Europeans and ignored the Native American and Hispanic populations that already occupied western lands, his point of view has continued to shape scholarship about territorial expansion in the United States. Turner's concept of the frontier intersected neatly with the mid-nineteenth-century theory of Manifest Destiny, an ideology rooted in the belief that the whole of the North American continent was divinely fated to come under the authority of the United States.
Painters and photographers performed a vital role in westward expansion, frequently accompanying official military expeditions to record the spectacular scenery and indigenous life of distant regions. But, as shown by the paintings on view here, the documentary impulse was often overridden by the desire to impress audiences with the sheer magnitude and topographical diversity of the North American west. Such paintings implied an infinite natural abundance and encouraged nationalistic sentiments and curiosity that stimulated additional travel. Embedded in the iconography, however, are hints of the negativity-motifs referring to tourism, the displacement of native populations, and the eventual depletion of natural resources-ideas that harmonized with the realization that continental expansion would cease once the Pacific was reached.
South America
The writings of the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (17691859) deserve the greatest credit for stirring nineteenth-century painters to travel to South America. Humboldt had spent five years exploring South America as part of his quest to map the world and catalogue its diverse life forms. In his multivolume Cosmos, portions of which were available in English in the 1840s, Humboldt emphasized the role of painters in the process of exploration, saying, "Why may we not be justified in hoping that landscape painting may hereafter bloom with new and yet unknown beauty, when highly-gifted artists shall often pass the narrow bounds of the Mediterranean, and shall seize . . . the living image of manifold beauty and grandeur in the humid mountain valleys of the tropical world?"
The popularity of Humboldt's theories in the United States coincided with the influence of other writers, including the English art critic John Ruskin (18191900). Ruskin's call for "truth to nature" not only meshed with the naturalist's scientific approach but also paralleled Humboldt's belief that it was the painter's obligation to transform the details of nature into compositions that would convey the majesty of creation. By 1859, with the publication of Charles Darwin's (18091881) On the Origin of Species, the stage was set for artists to shift their attention from the history-laden, knowable "Old World" to the uncontrolled tropical landscape and its seemingly limitless varieties of flora and fauna, all of which held the promise of revealing the secrets of the earth's primeval past and its future.
Life in the Landscape
By the 1830s the iconography of the settled landscape had became the chief metaphoric tool for mapping the developing culture of the United States. The strength of this metaphor derived from the ongoing search for national identity, an intellectual route founded in the notion that what defined an "American" was his/her relationship with the land. James Fenimore Cooper (17891851), one of the first novelists to concentrate on contemporary American life, mused retrospectively about the constantly transforming landscape in The Pioneers (first published in 1823), observing that, "Five years had wrought greater changes, than a century would produce in countries, where time and labour have given permanency to the works of man." Cooper's narratives were often constructed around the activities and values of the full range of social classes and ethnicities with particular reference to their connections with the land.
At the same time that Cooper was writing, American painters undertook similar themes and, using the template of European genre paintings-works that featured the daily lives of ordinary people-translated the details of those lives into the vernacular of American experience. Although the majority of these paintings were designed for urban audiences and patrons, their subject matter was dominated by idealized and sometimes humorous images of farm and village life populated by what would become clearly identifiable American character types who engaged in behavior that resonated with the political, moral, and social ideals of the nation.
William Guy Wall and The Hudson River Portfolio
In the summer of 1820 the Irish-born and -trained landscape artist William Guy Wall (1792after 1864) went on an extended sketching tour of the Hudson River Valley and its environs. A selection of Wall's watercolors recording sights on his tour was engraved by the master printmaker John Hill (17701850) in The Hudson River Portfolio, published in New York City by Henry J. Megarey between 1821 and 1825. Long considered a cornerstone in the development of American printmaking and landscape painting, its twenty topographical views cover roughly 212 miles of the 315-mile course of the Hudson River. The first series of prints to make Americans aware of the beauty and sublimity of their own scenery, the seminal Portfolio helped to stimulate national pride and cultural identity and was so popular that it was reprinted in 1828 by G. & C. & H. Carvill. It is no wonder that Wall is often seen as a forerunner of the first group of American landscape painters to focus on American subjects known as the Hudson River School.
The Hudson River Portfolio follows the format of the well-established English picturesque touring itineraries featuring both images and text. All eight known extant watercolors preparatory for The Portfolio's aquatints are in the Society's collection. They are exhibited in this gallery, together with alternative views that were not reproduced as plates, nature studies by Wall, and a selection of independent impressions of the plates as well as a bound copy of the entire Portfolio.
Artists and Patrons: A History of Art Collecting
in Nineteenth-Century New York
The popularity of the Hudson River School in mid-nineteenth-century America was inextricably linked to the cultural and artistic maturation of New York City. A driving force behind the city's ascendance as a major art capital was the emergence of a new class of artistic patrons wedded to the creation of a national artistic culture, with American artists at the forefront. Three pioneering New York art patrons of the period-Luman Reed, Thomas Jefferson Bryan, and Robert Leighton Stuart-were leaders in advancing American art and connoisseurship. They amassed important collections, encompassing landscape painting, genre painting, and portraiture, and their efforts to foster public appreciation of the fine arts in America, played a major role in establishing the New-York Historical Society as one of the city's premier museums of fine art.
Luman Reed (17851836)
Between 1830 and his premature death in 1836, Luman Reed, a successful dry goods merchant, assembled one of the first significant collections of American art, which he displayed in a specially designed gallery in his Manhattan townhouse. The renowned Hudson River School artists Thomas Cole and Asher Brown Durand flourished under his patronage, as did William Sidney Mount, the distinguished genre painter, and George Whiting Flagg. Reed's generous patronage of contemporary American artists was guided by his desire to establish a national artistic culture in the United States and his belief in the capability of these artists to produce works equal, if not superior, to their European counterparts. It was this expansive vision that also inspired him to open his private art holdings to the public. Luman Reed's entire collection was purchased after his death by a group of his friends to form the nucleus of New York's first public gallery of art, The New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts, which opened in 1844. In 1858 the collection was donated to the New-York Historical Society, where it survives intact.
Thomas Jefferson Bryan (18021870)
Thomas Jefferson Bryan pursued a life-long study of art and culture. As a young man, he traveled throughout Europe, amassing one of the most important nineteenth-century collections of European art in the United States. For Bryan, European artists, especially old masters, were synonymous with culture, education, and prestige. Returning to the United States in the early 1850s after twenty years abroad, Bryan settled in New York and, like Luman Reed before him, established a public gallery, which he called The Bryan Gallery of Christian Art. Praised by the New York press, the gallery was heralded as the potential nucleus of a permanent city or national museum.
His passion for European art notwithstanding, Bryan also collected American art. In 1854 he purchased a number of important paintings from the sale of Peale's Museum in his native Philadelphia, among them the monumental portrait of the Peale Family, on view in this gallery. In 1863 Bryan further augmented his American collection with works from the American Museum in New York, a museum of both natural history and fine art. By the mid-1860s the New-York Historical Society was considered the city's foremost repository of fine art, prompting Bryan to donate his extensive painting collection in 1867.
Robert Leighton Stuart (18061882)
A successful New York sugar refiner, Robert Leighton Stuart rose to prominence in the mid-nineteenth century, building lavish homes in which to showcase his extensive collections of books, paintings, decorative arts, and artifacts. He also established himself as one the city's most generous philanthropists. Stuart began to collect paintings in the 1850s and, like Reed before him, fostered the work of contemporary American artists, many of whom he met as a member of New York's Century Club. Among Stuart's fellow club members were many of the famed Hudson River School landscape painters-Asher Brown Durand, John Frederick Kensett, Sanford Robinson Gifford, Frederic Edwin Church, and Jasper Francis Cropsey-as well as the renowned genre painter Eastman Johnson. Between 1856 and 1866, Stuart commissioned or purchased at least one painting from each of these prominent American artists and acquired two paintings by Thomas Cole from Durand and Kensett.
Stuart also nurtured a taste for European art, which intensified in the late 1860s following the dismissive reception by European critics of American art exhibited at the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Following Stuart's death in 1882, his widow, Mary McCrea Stuart (18101891), donated his art collection to the Lenox Library, which eventually became the New York Public Library. In 1944 nearly 250 of Stuart's paintings were transferred to the New-York Historical Society, where they reside today.
A Passion for Genre Painting:
The Luman Reed and Robert Leighton Stuart Collections
Avid patrons of Hudson River School artists, Luman Reed and Robert Leighton Stuart nonetheless counted genre painting, or scenes of daily life, as their favorite art form. The development of genre painting dates back to seventeenth-century Europe, specifically to the Netherlands, where newly gained prosperity generated a large middle class and led to a broad-based patronage of art. Two centuries later, the art form took root in America when similar conditions engendered a popular taste for pictures of people engaged in everyday activities. At its best, nineteenth-century American genre painting presented a convincing view of daily life, both rural and urban, while also communicating varied aspects of universal experience and moralizing ideology that transcended the specific incident portrayed. Selected genre paintings from the Reed and Stuart collections are featured in this gallery.
The Door Panels for Luman Reed's Picture Gallery
As was fashionable among other elite American collectors, the floor plan of Reed's picture gallery was a double parlor. Two small doors opened into each of the two rooms, and two larger doors divided the double parlor, all of which had recessed panels. With the passion of a true collector, Reed was not one to waste valuable space for hanging works of art and decided to fill the door recesses with original paintings. Calling on Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand, George Whiting Flagg, and William Sidney Mount to contribute to the scheme, Reed commissioned panels of simple genre subjects, which were to be executed in a free and uncomposed manner. Fourteen of the original panel paintings survive, four of which are by Cole and the rest attributed to Durand. The six on view here came to the New-York Historical Society through generous donations from Reed's family descendents and a private collector. The other eight panels are dispersed among private collections and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford Connecticut.
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