Good afternoon and welcome to those of you here in the East Building Auditorium and also to those watching online. I'm Heidi Applegate. I'm an independent art historian and I have been giving gallery talks and lectures through the Education Division.
This is the fourth installment in the summer series of Sunday Afternoon Lectures devoted to celebrating the old master collections in the West Building. Today's lecture is focused on American paintings, and before I begin, I would like to thank Franklin Kelly, Nancy Anderson, Anne Halpern for their help answering questions about the history of the collection, and also Shannon Morelli and Lisa Coldiron for their help with images. The National Gallery opened in 1941 with just 10 American paintings, all portraits from Andrew Mellon's collection.
installed in three galleries along with several loans to help fill the space. Here we see Gilbert Stewart's portrait of Mrs. Yates on the left side of Gallery 60, where Thomas Cole's youth from the voyage of life now hangs. Lawrence Yates, her brother-in-law, is on the right.
You'll notice that the central doorway leading into the next room is closed because that room, where the presidents now hang, was not only empty, it wasn't finished. Mellon wanted the collection to include American art because British art plays an important role in the London National Gallery. And Mellon, as ambassador to London in the years just before he presented his collection to the nation as a gift in 1937, was consciously modeling his ideas for the new American National Gallery on the British example. Because the initial collection was so small, unlike the original, the formative gift that Mellon, Peter Widener, and Samuel Cress provided for the Dutch, British, and Italian galleries, the story of the American collection is very different.
It is an assembled collection built through gifts and purchases made possible with donated funds. And it's important to note that no federal funding has ever been used for acquisitions. Everything in the collection is here through the generosity of donors who either gave their art or the money.
to buy the art. There are now 1,220 American paintings in the collection, limited by date to 1900. And I'm going to talk about a few things that go beyond 1900, but that was an easy way to just limit the database. And this 1,220 American paintings compares to 612 French paintings, 435 Italian paintings, 270 Dutch and Flemish paintings, and 160 British paintings.
So today I will consider the American collection both in terms of subject matter, portraiture, landscape, genre, and still life, and also in terms of how the collection has grown through key gifts and purchases over the past seven decades. The recent edition in 2014 of nearly 400 paintings from the Corcoran Gallery of Art has been... the most significant event in the history and expansion of the American collection.
William Wilson Corcoran, seen here in an 1883 photo by Matthew Brady, began collecting in the 1840s, and construction of his gallery, or on his gallery, was begun more than a decade before the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, or the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, were even founded. On the upper right is a view of the original Corcoran Gallery, now part of the Smithsonian and known as the Renwick. It was renamed for its architect in 1965. And below, the main picture gallery upstairs in the 1880s.
The Corcoran Gallery of Art was the first cultural institution to be established expressly as an art museum in this country. And in a certain way, Corcoran's collection has become... the cornerstone group of paintings that the National Gallery lacked in 1941. And I will emphasize how, of the 48 works from the Corcoran's collection that are currently on view in the West Building, how these works have transformed the American galleries in almost every room. Here is Gallery 60 as it looks today, with two scenes from Thomas Cole's Voyage of Life and a view on axis of John Singleton Copley's Watson and the Shark from 1778. Watson and the Shark is a large picture.
It's a rare history painting in the American collection. It also includes It's an unconventional portrait of the figure in the water being attacked by a shark. Brooke Watson, the man in the water, was 14 when he was working on a merchant ship that was docked in the Havana Harbor, and he made the ill-fated decision to go swimming. Watson commissioned Copley to paint this large-scale record of the event 30 years later in London, and Copley chose to depict the dramatic moment After the shark has already attacked and bitten off Watson's leg, notice the blood in the water at the lower left.
But just before, Watson was rescued. Watson went on to have a successful career as a businessman and politician. There is an extensive label on the frame that lists Watson's many later accomplishments, including being elected Lord Mayor of London.
Watson donated the painting to a London orphanage because he himself was an orphan. and he hoped that the painting would remind other young boys down on their luck to not lose faith that they too could triumph over adversity. The bibliography on this painting is vast, and the literature on the significance of the black figure alone is extensive.
Not surprisingly, for such a large and complex composition, Copley made several studies for the painting, and in this one on the left, the figure at the top of the pyramid in the boat was initially a white man. Copley most likely replaced that figure with a black man to add site-specific accuracy for a scene set in the Caribbean, where African sailors were common in the 18th century. Copley himself never went to the Caribbean. He based his Havana harbor on prints and maps of Cuba. But many argue that there is much more to this figure than a location reference.
And one argument is that for a London audience, The figure would have been a reminder of the colonists'hypocrisy of fighting a war for freedom when they themselves enslaved a significant proportion of their population. But that interpretation is problematic because Watson himself opposed abolition, and he was the one paying for the picture. As a side note, and as commentary on Watson's views in support of slavery, in 1905, the American historian Samuel Isham wrote, quote, there are those whose sympathy is with the shark, end quote.
This was the second picture that Copley presented at the Royal Academy after moving his family to London to escape the revolution. As I discussed last week, Copley's family portrait advertised his mastery of portraiture. This painting demonstrated his ability to apply the compositional strategies, the complex group of figures are arranged in a pyramid, and ennobling classical references of the European grand manner tradition to the depiction of an event from recent history.
It was a sensation because of its grisly subject matter, but also because sophisticated visitors to the Royal Academy recognized Copley's many references to works by Raphael and Rubens in the poses of the figures. Copley became a member of the Royal Academy, and he made a fortune selling engravings of this painting. The painting makes a dramatic beginning for a visit to the American galleries.
It is particularly popular with school groups. It also indicates Copley's ambition as a painter and the kind of picture he never would have been able to paint in America. There was simply no market for anything on this scale in the colonies.
Because it was painted in London, it could hang in the British galleries along with his family portrait. But the scene takes place in the Americas, and seen in conjunction with the kinds of portraits that he painted in Boston before he left for Europe, its location helps to more fully represent the two sides to Copley's career. In the same gallery with Watson, facing him, are Anne Fairchild Bowler on the left, painted in 1763, 15 years before Watson and the Shark.
And it's a great example of Copley's earlier, more severely realist style. Mrs. Bowler's dress overpowers her presence in vying for our attention. But the portraits in this gallery also demonstrate Copley's tremendous diplomatic ability to remain neutral up until the Revolution.
His father-in-law was the person who received the tea that was dumped into Boston Harbor, so those political leanings are what forced him to leave. But before he left, his commissions came equally from patriots. and loyalists. On the right is Abigail Smith Babcock.
Her husband was a patriot. Mrs. Bowler's was a British spy. Copley's sitters were willing to put their politics aside since no one compared to his talent. That point is made clear in the adjoining room with two portraits from the Corcoran collection. On the left is a portrait from about 1760 by Joseph Blackburn that I introduced last week.
Blackburn was a British artist who spent a large portion of his career painting portraits in the colonies before returning to London. Blackburn influenced Copley's early interest in including every detail of the exquisite fabrics and textures of the work. of his sitter's clothes, and the embroidery on this gentleman's vest is remarkable.
But as the Revolution approached and a reliance on expensive imported fabrics became a political issue, even well-to-do sitters opted for a more restrained representation. Thomas Amory II, on the right, owned a Boston distillery. Copley painted him around 1770 to 72 and demonstrates his ability to shift his focus from capturing the materials of external appearance to emphasizing the quiet dignity and character of his subject. Blackburn's Gentleman and Copley's portrait of Thomas Amory also give new context to Charles Wilson Peale's full-length portrait of John Beale Bordley, painted in 1770, the same date as Amory's portrait. Charles Wilson Peale, the artist seen on the left in a self-portrait that dates to 1777 to 78, was a close friend of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.
He founded the first Museum of Natural History in America. He founded and became the first director of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the oldest art school in America. He also did his part to populate the new nation with artists.
He had 17 children, all named after famous artists, and many of them did become artists themselves. I'll be talking about Rembrandt, Rubens, and Raphael Peale later. Both Peale and his good friend John Bordley, the man depicted, strongly supported the revolution and took part in the war.
This painting was commissioned by Bordley's brother in London to be exhibited there as a declaration of colonial opposition to the British government, and it is full of symbolism representing arguments for independence. Bordley was a lawyer. He points to the sculpture representing English law.
which in theory guaranteed the same rights for the colonists as it did to English subjects living in England. The torn document on the ground depicts a recent edict for collecting customs duties that the colonists have rejected. Bordley is depicted on his plantation where he raised sheep.
The sheep symbolized self-sufficiency from British textiles, and half of all imports into the colonies were textiles. Bordley wears... homespun cloth, and he has no wig.
The pack horse loaded with goods in the background on the left is being led by a British soldier and refers to the onerous taxes demanded by colonial officials. The approaching storm suggests that war is inevitable, but the blue sky beyond indicates that peace and prosperity will triumph. As I discussed last week with respect to the portrait of John Musters by Sir Joshua Reynolds from 1777 on the left, In the Grand Manor portrait tradition, the pose of the figure is based on classical principles of design, and the indeterminate background in no way competes for our attention with the figure.
The only aspect of the Grand Manor that Peale has not deliberately subverted here is the scale of the figure. Bordley is completely lacking in pretension. He is not posing or making a display of himself, and he addresses us directly in order to to direct our attention to all of those details in the setting that convey explicit meaning.
This is Gilbert Stuart's The Skater from 1782. Just before the war broke out, Copley left for London, never to return. Gilbert Stuart, a young precocious art student, also left to apprentice with Benjamin West at the Royal Academy. When Stuart returned in 1893, he rarely painted full-length portraits like this one.
the painting that established his career in London. Instead, he focused on the more restrained and scaled-down approach to portraiture demonstrated by the 10 portraits hanging in Gallery 60A. Mrs. Yeats, from 1793 to 94, is here, just one room away from where she hung in 1941. This is someone who does not suffer fools gladly, and she looks up from her sewing as if to say, your reason for interrupting me. had better be a good one.
Stewart has not flattered her. There is the slightest hint of a mustache on her upper lip, and she looks about twice her 38 years. But Stewart's experience with her Impressive brushwork imbues her with a sense of intensity and the movement of the momentary turn that she has just made to face us.
It is one of the best portraits that he ever produced. Stuart is most famous for his many portraits of George Washington, and the one hanging in the same room with Mrs. Yates is part of a set of portraits of the first five presidents, known as the Gibbs Coolidge set, after its first two owners. Stuart made two of these sets. The other one was hanging in the Library of Congress in 1851 when a fire destroyed the portraits of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson. And so the National Gallery now has the only complete set, and all of the frames, obviously not visible here, are original.
The Gallery's collection includes 45 portraits by Gilbert Stuart. Eighteen more are on view, many of them in the ground floor galleries hanging with the Kaufman collection. These are four of the Stuart portraits on view downstairs.
On the upper left are two more from Mellon's original ten pictures. This portrait of Washington was based on his first sitting for Stuart in 1795. John Randolph is next. He was a member of Congress and 32 when Stuart painted him.
But he looks about half his age. And on the right is a pair. the great pair of John and Abigail Adams.
By the time Stuart finally delivered the portrait of Abigail 15 years after she sat for him, he had pretty much given up ever seeing it finished. Back upstairs, directly next door to the President's, are three portraits by George Catlin. In 1965, Paul Mellon donated 351 portraits and scenes documenting Native American life.
that Catlin produced after he was forced to use his first Indian gallery of almost 500 paintings as collateral for Alone. The original Indian gallery is now owned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum where many more works by Catlin are on view. These three portraits remind us with the view through to the next gallery that America had its own founding fathers and mothers long before the ones from Europe arrived. Filling out this gallery are paintings by American naive or folk artists, artists who, like Catlin, were self-taught.
Beginning in 1953 and ending with a final bequest in 1980, Edward and Bernice Chrysler Garbish gave their collection of more than 300 American naive paintings. And the Catlin and Garbish collections are part of the reason why the American collection is so large. These are just two examples, Joshua Johnson's The Westwood Children from 1807 on the left and Edward Hicks'The Peaceable Kingdom from about 1907. 1834 on the right.
Joshua Johnson was a freed slave who started painting portraits in Baltimore around 1800. He is the earliest known professional black artist working in America. He may have received some training from one of the members of the Peale family, but he was largely self-taught. These are the three sons of John Westwood, who was a plantation owner, and whose portrait, The Father.
also painted by Johnson, is on view across the mall at the Museum of African American History and Culture. Edward Hicks was a sign, furniture, and carriage painter before he became a Quaker minister. He did more than 60 versions of the peaceable kingdom over a period of nearly 30 years.
Before we move on to landscape, I want to mention two additional portraits from the early 19th century both by Rembrandt Peale the most successful of Charles Wilson Peale's many artistic children. Rembrandt painted this portrait of his brother Rubens with a geranium in 1801, and it can be described as a double portrait. On the left is Rubens, an avid botanist, age 17, who suffered from poor eyesight and holds a second pair of glasses in his hand. And on the right is a portrait of a geranium, a plant that Rubens is thought to have been the first to cultivate in America. In 1985, this portrait was the gallery's first purchase made with the Patron's Permanent Fund, an endowment for art acquisition that was begun in 1981 and built through donations from hundreds of individuals, foundations, and corporations across the country.
I'll be mentioning a few more important acquisitions that have been made with that fund. More recently, this portrait by Rembrandt Peale joined the collection, and it represents the artist at his most ambitious. Peale painted George Washington from life in 1795 when he, Rembrandt Peale, was 17. And then 30 years later, he used that life study as the basis for this grand equestrian portrait of Washington before the Battle of Yorktown, with Lafayette is on the left side of the portrait and Alexander Hamilton is riding out of the right side of the painting.
Peale was unable to To convince the U.S. government to purchase this painting for the Capitol Rotunda, it passed through his descendants who gave it to Mount Vernon. And in the 1940s, long before they had their nice new visitor's center and a proper place to hang it, Mount Vernon gave it to the Corcoran Gallery of Art. And it now hangs in the stairwell at the west end of the West Building in a space grand enough to do it justice.
It is a very large painting. The first American landscape painting to enter the collection was a purchase made by Mrs. Huddleston Rogers for the gallery in 1945. This is George Innes's The Lackawanna Valley from 1856. During William Campbell's tenure as curator from 1951 into the 1970s, three more major landscapes were also purchased. Cropsey's enormous Autumn on the Hudson from 1860 was acquired in 1963. Frederick Church's The River of Light on the left from 1877 was acquired in 1965, and Thomas Cole's Crawford Notch from 1839 was acquired in 1967, and it's on the right.
In 1971, Cole's four-part allegorical series The Voyage of Life was purchased with funds provided by Elsa Mellon Bruce, Mellon's daughter. These are now the first paintings you encounter as you enter the American galleries. So in less than 30 years, and starting with nothing, the National Gallery had managed to build an impressive core group of American landscapes.
With his multi-canvas series, Thomas Cole sought to create what he called a higher style of landscape, landscapes that aspired to history painting, which ranked above pure landscape because history paintings incorporated narrative and also moral lessons about man's place in the world. This series started as a commission for a New York businessman. who died soon after Cole began working on it. The family supported continuing the project, but there were issues over whether Cole would be able to exhibit the pictures publicly. So Cole painted a duplicate version of the series in 1842. This is the second version, and Cole exhibited these four paintings in Rome before bringing them back to the U.S. to show in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.
This was the set that was first shown to the public and which established its fame. After Cole's death in 1848, the series became even more popular when arrangements were made to have it engraved and distributed through an organization called the American Art Union. The Art Union was established to increase support for the arts, and for an annual fee, members received an engraving of the featured work and a chance to win the original.
Imagine winning these four paintings. When Cole's series was featured, membership skyrocketed, and because prints of the paintings were sent to all of those new members, these were also some of the best-known works of American art in the 1840s. The subject is a spiritual journey down the river of life, and Cole issued lengthy descriptions of each scene to make sure that his audience wouldn't miss any of the details, and those descriptions are included upstairs alongside the pictures.
Childhood is set in a lush, Edenic landscape. The boat emerges from a womb-like cave. The guardian angel steers the boat.
It is morning. Youth was the first scene to be engraved, and it was the most popular of the series. The young man has taken over the helm, leaving his guardian angel behind on shore. He appears to be headed straight for the castle in the sky.
There is a convenient path from the river leading straight to it. He is eager, confident. charging ahead, completely unaware of the sharp bend in the river. It is midday.
In manhood, the ship is in danger of being battered on rocks in the midst of a violent storm, with demons threatening in the sky. They represent suicide, intemperance, murder. It is evening. In the last panel, Old Age, faith has sustained him.
He has made it through to the calm water beyond. His guardian angel has come down. to lead him into heaven. It is night. The traveler ages.
The ship is almost destroyed. The time of day progresses. The landscape changes. Earth recedes so that there is nothing green left.
This world has no further interest for him. Cole intended to convey a very clear Christian message of death and resurrection, but the series was also understood as a cautionary tale for the new nation, which in the 1840s was enjoying the promise of youth. Coal worried about what would become of America if it got too caught up in its ambitious goals for expansion, manifest destiny, industrialization, and if too much of the sacred wilderness was lost. These are three paintings by Asher Brown Durand, who was trained as an engraver before he turned to landscape painting, inspired by Cole's example and encouragement.
Durand was elected president of the National Academy of Design in 1845, and after Cole's death in 1848, Durand became the leader of the American Landscape School. He is best known for his pastoral scenes and forest interiors. There are examples of both of these types of landscapes currently on view, along with a rare shipwreck picture.
Both generations of the Hudson River School are now exceptionally well represented with the addition of the Corcoran pictures. Frederick Edwin Church was Cole's only student and he secured his reputation with this painting, Niagara. It is painted on a panoramic scale that positions the viewer precariously hovering just above the falls about to go over.
It is a tour de force in its depiction of water in every aspect of movement. And it was Church's response to criticism that he didn't know how to paint water. This painting toured several cities along the East Coast and then in England as a great picture show.
People paid admission to see this one painting. And it established Church's career as the preeminent American landscape painter by the late 1850s. Niagara is one of the all-time iconic paintings in American art. And along with the Corcoran's Tamaca Palms from 1854 on the upper left, one of Church's early South American subjects, and the late River of Light from 1877 on the upper right, a painting that is based on Church's sketches of his memory of his travels in the tropics from 20 years earlier.
With this group brought together, the span of Church's career can now be seen in the same room with the great Niagara. And recent promised gifts from John Wilmerding lend additional depth with two early main seascapes from 1850 and 1851 below Niagara. John Wilmerding was the curator of American art from 1977 to 1983, and he has recently given 17 paintings as well as drawings, sculpture, and photographs to the National Gallery.
Niagara is currently hanging between two quiet seascapes by John Kensett. Kensett preferred to work small. and he focused on a few favorite locations easily accessible from New York, Lake George, Beverly, Massachusetts, Newport, Rhode Island. Both of these are typical of Kensett's work in that the composition includes a massive rock formation balanced by an open expanse of calm water. In The Beach at Beverly on the left, the open expanse of sea and sky nearly merge into one at the right.
Beach at Beverly is more than a decade later than Beacon Rock on the left, which was painted in the same year as Niagara, but they belong this way because the rock formations are like bookends for Niagara. Alfred Thompson Britcher's A Quiet Day Near Manchester from 1873 is closely related to Kensett's Beach at Beverly, and it may have been intended as a tribute to Kensett, who died unexpectedly in 1873. Manchester is the next town north of Beverly along the Massachusetts coast. Two women enjoy the view from the lower rocks at the left.
The sandy beach is unoccupied apart from some wooden debris, and the title aptly describes the scene, which is calm and sunny. Britcher was particularly good at rendering the reflective sheen of the shallow water left on the beach as the last wave recedes. This is a fairly recent acquisition from 2008. And it is also the first painting by Britcher to enter the collection.
Sanford Robinson Gifford is a second generation Hudson River School painter who first entered the collection in 1999 with the purchase of the Egyptian landscape on the left. It's a view of the city of Sute with the Nile in the distance, all seen through the thick haze of the late afternoon sun. It is now joined by the Corcoran's Ruins of the Parthenon on the right.
one of Gifford's most important paintings, certainly in terms of his foreign subjects, and Gifford loved to travel. And then there is Albert Bierstadt. There is a reason why the National Gallery's collection meshes so well with the Corcoran's. Because of the great strengths of the Corcoran collection, and also those of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery's curators have never intended for this collection to be definitive. They aimed to fill gaps in a way that complemented rather than duplicated existing works already here in Washington.
And there is perhaps no better example of that complementary acquisition practice than the effort to acquire Bierstadt's Lake Lucerne when it resurfaced in 1990. There was initially some resistance to buying a Swiss subject because Bierstadt was famous for his Western... Western scenes of the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada, and Yosemite. But the Smithsonian already had one of the great 6 by 10 foot examples of those mid-career Western subjects.
And the Corcoran Gallery owned Bierstadt's last great 6 by 10 foot painting, The Last of the Buffalo. Bierstadt's early career was not already represented in Washington, and it made perfect sense for the National Gallery. with the depth of its European landscape collection for context, to acquire Bierstadt's first great 6-by-10-foot exhibition statement.
Nancy Anderson, the gallery's current curator of American art and a Bierstadt expert, has demonstrated that Bierstadt recycled much of his early approach to the mountain scenery in Switzerland when he began churning out large-scale landscapes of the American West. The early Swiss picture was important source material for his later work. With the merging of the two collections in 2014, you can now see the first and the last of Bierstadt's great 6x10 foot pictures in one place, as well as Mount Corcoran below.
This was painted in about 1876-77. It is a Sierra Nevada peak that Bierstadt renamed for Corcoran in an effort to convince him to buy it, which he did. In 2011, Green River Cliffs, Wyoming, painted in 1881, became the first Western subject by Thomas Moran to enter the collection.
Moran is best known for his enormous paintings of Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon that are on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. On his way west to join the survey team headed for Yellowstone in 1871, Moran spent some time in Green River, Wyoming, and sketched the dramatic buttes that rose above the town and above the railroad. that crossed this plain.
When Moran passed through, the town of Green River included a church, a school, a hotel, and a brewery. Moran replaced the bustling town, railroad, and a new bridge over the river with a band of Indians fording the river on horseback and riding into the setting sun. The painting completely denies the reality of the technological advances in the form of the railroad that had altered the American landscape. Moran instead created an idealized view of the country's past and the Native Americans who had long ago been driven out of Green River. And now we shift from a new favorite to an old favorite.
Winslow Homer's Breezing Up from 1873 to 76 was a purchase made possible by the Mellon Foundation in 1943. This is the painting that reestablished Homer's career after the Civil War as a painter who was devoted to scenes of everyday life. and to subjects connected to the sea, a subject that he would continue to explore throughout his life. This painting depicts three boys and an older man sailing in a cat boat in Gloucester Harbor and returning from a successful day of fishing.
The boat is full of fish. The late sun breaking through the clouds casts warm pools of light on the shoulders of the two upright boys and the hand of the middle boy. The sail is full.
And the boys are all positioning their weight to one side to counterbalance the force of the wind that pushes the other side of the boat under the water. This is an image of leisure, and the boys are enjoying the speed of the boat. And even if we sense that they are ready to grab on if the wind shifts, we also get the sense that they are not in any real danger of capsizing.
It is an uplifting and happy scene. The painting was exhibited at the annual National Academy exhibition in the spring of 1876, and it received very high praise. Here's one review. Quote, there is not a picture in this exhibition, nor can we remember when there has been a picture in any exhibition that can be named alongside of this. End quote.
So it's basically the best picture of all time. These next two paintings by Homer join the collection also relatively early in 1947 and 1951. Hound and Hunter on the left from 1892 is an Adirondack hunting scene. The deer is dead and the boy is trying to prevent the deer from sinking.
Right and left on the right, painted in 1909, is Winslow Homer's last great picture, painted the year before he died in 1910. It is another hunting scene. The title refers to the act of shooting ducks successively with a double-barreled shotgun, one with the right barrel and then immediately one with the left. The second shot has just been fired. You can see the flash and smoke in the detail below.
Homer hired a man to fire blank shots in his direction so he could observe the flare through the fog. The duck on the right is falling. The other has just been hit. hit. Some scholars have suggested that the duck on the right is diving in reaction to the sound of the first blast, in which case the second shot may hit us instead, and Homer most likely intended for this to be ambiguous.
The jagged crests of the choppy water add to the intensity of the scene, while the thick band of creamy gray paint at the top of the canvas suggests the sky just before dawn. The sun is about. to rise. Paul Mellon gave several pictures by Homer that all date to the 1870s.
On the lower right, I'll just mention, this is the study for Breezing Up, which shows that Homer replaced one of the boys with an anchor and also changed who is steering the boat. In the sketch, it is the old man. In the finished painting for exhibition, it is the boy who is staring off to the horizon. The Homer collection was impressive, but it lacked an early Civil War picture. Home Sweet Home from 1863 on the left filled that gap.
This was a purchase in 1997 made possible through the Patron's Permanent Fund. Not long after this painting joined the collection, another Civil War subject and one of the most important works of 19th century American sculpture was installed nearby. The Shaw Memorial in the center is an unusual monument in that it represents Colonel Shaw. marching with his men of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, which was one of the first regiments of African-American soldiers to be formed following the Emancipation Proclamation. George Healy's portrait of Lincoln from the Corcoran Collection now hangs in the same room with the Shaw Memorial.
It was the first portrait made after Lincoln was elected in November 1860, and it was the last portrait of Lincoln before he grew a beard. On the advice of an 11-year-old girl, who wrote to Lincoln to tell him that she thought he would look better with a beard. I love that he followed her advice.
I think he did the right thing to follow her advice. The gallery's collection of works by Homer was now even stronger, but with the addition of these two paintings, it is now possible to tell his entire story. Sparrow Hall on the left is a promised gift from John Wilmerding. Homer painted this scene of women, children, and two cats during the time he spent in England from 1881 to 82. a period that came to signify a major turning point in his career. When Homer returned from England, he did not return to New York, but settled instead at Prowt's Neck in Maine.
On the right is yet another Corcoran picture, A Light on the Sea, from 1897. When Homer exhibited this painting, he described it as a large landscape figure. He didn't describe it as a figure in a landscape or a landscape with a large figure. He called it a large landscape figure, and this makes the landscape and the figure equivalent.
The title, A Light on the Sea, does not mention the figure at all, but it does accurately describe the painting's other key element, the light reflecting on the sea, which Homer suggests with a thin line of thick white paint at the horizon, broader strokes below, and shorter, almost calligraphic brushwork in the middle distance and in the foreground. where the light and the water pool among the rocks. The paint surface is thick and expressive, and the most extraordinary thing about this painting. Now you can see every aspect of Homer's career represented and on view in the collection. There were 250 paintings in the collection at the time that the two-volume systematic catalog of the 19th century collection was published in 1998. And at that time, the strengths were landscape, portraits, and figure paintings.
Weaknesses were genre painting, scenes of everyday life, and still life. The Corcoran fills those genre gaps. All three of the most important antebellum genre painters are now represented by excellent examples.
On the left is William Sidney Mount's The Tough Story from 1837. It portrays an old man. who talks the ear off the tavern keeper and a traveler trapped waiting for the next stagecoach. Richard Caton Woodville painted just 15 paintings in his short career, so it is a rare thing to get to have one of these. He died when he was 30. Waiting for the stage from 1851 on the right is another scene with three men in a tavern who are killing time. Woodville's pictures tend to be a bit darker than Mount's, both in terms of the color and the lighting.
of the composition but also in their meaning. The two men at the table are playing cards. The third man is standing next to them reading a newspaper clearly labeled The Spy.
He is wearing the glasses. of a blind man. But why would a blind man be reading the paper?
From where he is standing, he can see both men's cards and is most likely helping the traveler, seated with his back to us, to fleece the other man, whose wedding ring catches the light and indicates that his family will suffer when he loses. George Caleb Bingham's Jolly Flat Boatman from 1846 was on loan to the National Gallery for many years. In 2015, it became part of the permanent collection, yet another major purchase made with the Patron's Permanent Fund. Bingham is famous for his river scenes on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, and his portrayal of the men who ferried cargo on flatboats, a trade that would soon be made obsolete by the invention of steamboats. This is arguably Bingham's most iconic version.
of the subject. In the late 1990s, a small room with cases, much like the Dutch cabinet galleries, was designed specifically for recent gifts and acquisitions of still life pictures. Many of these are small-scale works that would be lost in the main galleries. Over the course of the past 25 years, still life painting has gone from a weakness to a major strength in the collection. There are three excellent Examples by Raphael Peale, the oldest son of Charles Wilson Peale.
Raphael also painted portraits, but he is known largely as the first still-life painter in America. In each of these tabletop compositions, painted between 1812 and 1822, light reflects off glass. The texture of the various fruit contrasts with nuts, marble, a tea cake, and shadows convey a sense of the shallow space. This is Robert Duncanson's Still Life with Fruit and Nuts, painted in 1848. Robert Duncanson was inspired by Thomas Cole to turn from an early focus on still life to landscape, and he is primarily known as a landscape painter.
He spent part of his career in Canada and Europe and is considered to be the first African-American artist to achieve international recognition. Still lifes by Duncanson are extremely rare. And I like to think of this as grand manner still life because the mound of fruit and nuts have been composed into the shape of a pyramid, and the stem of the pear visually extends the height of the pyramid.
Five small tabletop still lives by John Frederick Peto from Paul and Bunny Mellon's collection are grouped together like this upstairs. Notice that the signature on the painting at the upper right is not Peto's. Peto and William Michael Harnett were good friends, and Peto occasionally signed some of his pictures with Harnett's name. Not surprisingly, many of those works were mistakenly identified as works by Harnett. The label upstairs now indicates that this work is falsely signed, because visitors used to frequently report a mistake in the wall text, which I think would have made Peto very happy.
Floral still lifes. now include the earliest known flower painting by Martin Johnson Heade on the upper left, dated to 1860, and then two more early examples. All three of the paintings on the top left are recent gifts from John Wilmerding, as is the picture on the lower left by Adelheid Dietrich, a German still life painter who exhibited regularly in Brooklyn and San Francisco, but it is not known where she lived, if she ever lived, in the United States.
In the center below, is Heed's Giant Magnolias on a Blue Velvet Cloth from 1869, perhaps the best example of Heed's floral arrangements that have been compared to reclining nudes. On the right is a large painting by Severin Rosen from 1848, a German immigrant who was the first American painter to emulate 17th century Dutch floral still lifes. Like works on view in the Dutch galleries, this painting combines many different types of flowers all at peak bloom.
Something that could never occur in nature. And the Rosen is from the Corcoran. One of the two great examples of trompe l'oeil in the American collection is also in this room, hanging inside a glass case that further discourages tempted visitors from testing to see if that money is real.
When illusionism is carried to the level of deception, it is considered trompe l'oeil, which means to trick the eye. This is John Haberle's Imitation, painted in 1887. Old bills, coins, torn stamps, and a photo of Haberle himself tucked into the corner are all painted in such a way as to deceive the viewer into thinking that they are real. The money is painted in layers that give the coins and the bills an almost three-dimensional quality.
The frame and the crooked peeling label with Haberle Haberle's printed name in newsprint at the bottom are also painted. Haberle signed the painting in the more usual way at the upper right. William Michael Harnett's The Old Violin from 1886 was acquired in 1993, and it's another excellent example of trompe l'oeil with an even greater variety of materials and objects, all painted with oil paint, but made to look... convincingly like real wood, rusted hinges, curled sheet music, an envelope with bent corners, and a newspaper clipping.
Trompe-l'oeil paintings are generally protected under glass, as this one is, because people can't help themselves from checking to see if the bits of paper are real. The objects in trompe-l'oeil paintings tend to be old and well-worn, which adds to the desire to touch them. The sheet music hanging behind the violin includes lines from songs that were published as simple melodies for amateur musicians.
Harnett collected musical instruments. He bought this violin in Paris, and it was the oldest and most valuable instrument in his collection. The letter stuck into the frame is addressed to Harnett, which serves as the signature for the painting, and it is postmarked Paris, which was Harnett's clever way of announcing his return to America after several years spent in Europe.
And now for something completely different, although they both involve music. This is Whistler's Symphony in White, No. 1, The White Girl, painted in 1863. It has been part of the collection almost from the beginning. It was a gift in 1943 from Harris Whittemore.
And it is a portrait of Whistler's mistress, Joanna Hiffernan, dressed in white, standing against a background of patterned white fabric, and on a bear rug with red that disturbingly seems to seep. from its lower edge. The bear looks out at the viewer.
Some people see a wolf. I see a bear. And its mouth is open, but it's not exactly menacing. For me, anyway, the bear appears to be laughing at us.
Meanwhile, the main subject of the painting is looking off into the distance with a vacant stare, not really focusing on anything. The two main 19th century exhibition venues in London and Paris, the Royal Academy and the Salon, both refused to exhibit this painting. So Whistler sent it to the Salon des Refusés, an official space in Paris for works that had been rejected. With this painting, Whistler was introducing the idea of art for art's sake. He believed that art should appeal to the eye, that it doesn't need to tell a story or relate to ideas or emotions.
Joanna's blank expression and unreadable pose keep the focus on color and pattern. Very few people understood what Whistler was doing, and very few could accept that there was no further story to tell. She holds a wilted lily, a traditional attribute of purity, and so the lily, and her somewhat disheveled appearance, led people to interpret her as the image of a woman after her wedding night, when she no longer recognizes herself.
Whistler feigned anger when a critic suggested that the painting may have been related to Wilkie Collins'serial thriller, The Woman in White. which was wildly popular when it was first published just three years earlier. Whistler had to have known that that association would be made, and he knew it would draw added attention to the painting. The first two times he exhibited the painting in London, he used the title The Woman in White.
But he insisted that the painting was only about color, that there was no story. He said, quote, My painting simply represents a girl dressed in white, standing in front of a white curtain, end quote. No mention of the bear. Whistler's white girl is now joined in the same room with Sargent's Mrs. White, now the National Gallery's best example of Sargent's Gilded Age Grand Manor portraits and yet another picture from the Corcoran Collection. There are also other portraits by Whistler and Sargent, as well as by Thomas Akins.
I'm not showing you anything by Thomas Akins in this gallery, but Mrs. White is incredible, and so I'm going to focus on her. Margaret White was from a prominent New York family. She married a diplomat, and they moved to Paris soon after they were married.
She sat for Sargent in Paris in 1882 when she was 29. Sargent followed her to the south of France for additional sittings, but he was unable to finish the painting in time for the Salon. So he exhibited it the following year in London, where it was praised for capturing, quote, the freshness of youth, end quote. This portrait is one of the best examples of Sargent's bravura brushwork, and by that I mean brushwork that becomes a performance, here as applied to a formal commissioned portrait.
He conveys the different kinds of fabric of Mrs. White's elaborate gown, all with visible expressive brush strokes, from the heavy shiny satin that reflects the light, the airy tulle in the skirt and transparent sleeves, to the fluffier lace decorating the collar and skirt. She is holding a fan and opera glasses, which also helpfully suggest a narrative, unlike Whistler's white girl, who just stands there gazing into the distance. Mrs. White is about to leave for the opera, and she looks us directly in the eye.
The subject's mother did not like the portrait. She thought Sargent should have made the mouth. smaller, and she also didn't like the way he captured her daughter with a raised eyebrow.
That is something that Sargent may have downplayed, because I don't really see either one of her eyebrows as being particularly raised here. Sargent continued to deal with complaints like these and the demands of his very wealthy sitters for 22 more years, and then he gave up portraiture and focused on subjects of his own choosing. This is Sargent's niece, Rosemarie Ormond, and he painted her many times. We know this is Rosemarie, but it's not a portrait.
The painting's original title is Nonchaloir, an archaic form of nonchalance which can be translated as casual indifference. The title does not identify Rosemarie, and it indicates that Sargent is more interested in capturing her mood of relaxation and escape, and perhaps also his own escape from the demands and expectations of formal portraiture. The brushwork in the skirt, the strokes enveloping her torso, the one long, thick, wide stroke above the couch, all call attention to the paint itself and the act of Sargent's application of the paint onto the canvas. An early review from when it was exhibited in 1912 here in D.C.
at the Corcoran Gallery described it as, quote, lovingly painted as if the artist gave himself over to the joy of doing just that which appealed to him, end quote. In his depiction of the shawl pulled taut around her torso, Sargent has wrapped his niece in strokes of paint. Notice, too, the echoing forms of the curve of her pinky and the underside of her hand with the curve of the top of the skirt, the thick stroke of yellow that gives definition to the fold at the hemline of her skirt.
This painting also joined the collection relatively early as a gift from Kurt Reisinger in 1948. It was the second painting by Sargent to enter the gallery. His portrait of Peter Widener on the left that usually hangs in the Founders Gallery was the first. An early Italian subject picture was added in the 1960s, Street in Venice from 1882 on the upper right.
And this view of a hillside in Majorca from 1908 on the lower right was added in 1991. But it is the addition of the Corcoran paintings that, as for Rembrandt Peale or Church or Bierstadt or Homer, Sargent's full story can now be told. The early setting out to fish on the left was well received at the 1878 Salon. It was only the second painting that Sargent sold.
The simplen pass view from 1911, the same year as Nonchaloir, is another excellent display of Sargent's varied brushwork, but as applied to landscape. The large boulder in the middle of the composition is a mound of brushstrokes. The water rushing over the rocks at the lower left is represented with a thick, white pile of paint that folds onto itself. If you zoom in on this pile of paint online as far as the zoom allows, as I have done for this detail, you will think you are looking at a work by an abstract expressionist painter in the East Building.
Three impressionist landscapes hang opposite the wall of Sargent's subject pictures. Childe Hassam's view off the coast of New Hampshire is bookended by views of Giverny by Willard Metcalf on the left and Theodore Robinson on the right. Both Metcalf and Robinson knew Monet personally and were inspired by views in and around Giverny.
Mary Cassatt was the only American artist to exhibit with the French Impressionists, and so her works appropriately hang in the French galleries, and this isn't even all of the ones that are on view. Sargent and Whistler, like Cassatt, spent most of their lives in Europe, but all three identified as Americans. Sargent even declined a British knighthood in order to keep his American citizenship. Whistler was born in Massachusetts, and although most of his works were painted in London, they have always hung in the American galleries. However, one of the long vistas between rooms, possibly the longest one anywhere in the West Building, links Whistler to the British galleries.
And I took both of these photos standing in the middle of Gallery 60, where Thomas Cole's Voyage of Life is hanging. Whistler's white girl is in conversation with Gilbert Stewart's skater across four rooms and nearly a center. And now a final point with respect to the Corcoran collection.
These large iconic works by Rembrandt Peale, Samuel F. B. Morse's House of Representatives, which I didn't have time to go into, it's an impressive portrait of a room and the 94 men in it that were there during an evening session of Congress. Church, Bierstadt, Sargent are all a testament to Corcoran's ambition to create a national collection long before Andrew Mellon arrived in the nation's capital. But in Gallery 71, more than any other room, the full impact of the Corcoran collection becomes clear.
Before the expansion and reinstallation of the East Building in 2016, late works by Homer and Sargent used to hang in 71, along with paintings by George Bellows, Robert Henry, and William Glackens. This is an installation view from 1997 that shows one of Bellows'boxing pictures next to Sargent's nonchaloir. in the corner, and I think that's a really inspired juxtaposition in terms of subject matter.
Moving the Ashcan School into the East Building was a way to give new context to those early American modernist works, but also to make room for so many 19th century works from the Corcoran's collection. Twelve of the 14 paintings now hanging in Gallery 71 are from the Corcoran. Ten of those twelve, these ten, were purchases made directly from the artists and from biennial exhibitions of contemporary art that the Corcoran organized beginning in 1907. When the National Gallery opened in 1941, the focus of the collection was primarily old master European art and colonial portraits.
There was even a strict policy of not acquiring art by anyone who had not been dead for 25 years. So because of this policy, even if it had existed, it was not accepted. The National Gallery of Art would have completely missed out on the possibility of buying art directly from artists during the early part of the 20th century when their work was readily available and when the artists themselves were sending their best things to be included in the Corcoran exhibitions with the potential and hope for purchase by the museum. Because of all this, the works in 71 fill significant gaps in the gallery's collection. With these three landscapes, Kenyon Cox, Daniel Garber, and Edward Redfield are now represented in the National Gallery.
These three men defended traditional realistic subjects well into the 20th century. Garber and Redfield in the center and on the right both worked and lived in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and they are often referred to as Pennsylvania Impressionists. Garber's April landscape from 1910 in the center and Redfield's Mill in Winter from 1921. on the right, are among the best works of their long careers.
Daniel Garber is also represented by South Room Green Street from 1920, a portrait of his wife and daughter in the front parlor of their Philadelphia townhouse. Garber himself said of this painting, quote, South Room Green Street is about the finest thing I've done so far. It is certainly the most colorful and the best interpretation of light sifting into a room.
As the light came through the heavy curtains, it made them seem almost like stained glass, and you felt the wonder and charm of its passage."This painting has been described as a visual treatise on light and the transformative effects that light produces on different materials. The curtains become stained glass. His daughter's hair becomes glowing strands of gold. The lacy pattern of the wicker chair is cast as shadow onto the rug. There are two mirrors that reflect the light and provide additional angles onto the room. Similarly, Alfred Maurer's Young Woman in a Kimono from 1901, William McGregor Paxton's Housemaid from 1910, Joseph de Camp's The Seamstress from 1916, and Cecilia Bow's portrait of her cousin Sarah Levitt with a black cat perched on her shoulder from 1921 are the first works by these four artists to enter the National Gallery. These are the two paintings in Gallery 71 that did not come from the Corcoran's collection. William Merritt Chase's A Friendly Call from 1895 on the left was a gift from Chester Dale, one of the early founding collectors that followed Mellon's example by giving his collection to the nation. Like many of the Corcoran pictures, this painting depicts a member of the artist's family, that's Chase's wife on the right, receiving a visitor in their summer home on Long Island. This painting has been part of the collection since 1943, just two years after the opening of the West Building. On the right is the most recent addition to the American collection, acquired last year, and it is the first work by Archibald Motley Jr. to enter the National Gallery. It is a portrait of Emily Motley, who was the artist's grandmother. She was born in 1842 in the South, enslaved. She made her way to Chicago following the Civil War and lived to be 102. Motley painted her in 1922 when she was 80 years old. None of the other young, white, upper-class women depicted in this gallery share her history or even her forthright engagement of the viewer. For that, we need to return to Mrs. Yates. And this is a comparison that Nancy Anderson made in a talk last March presented at the Wilmerding Symposium. That talk was recorded and is available to watch on the gallery's website. Also available to watch on the gallery's website is Professor Richard Powell's interpretation of the Motley portrait as part of the Reflections on the Collection series produced by CASVA. Emily Motley transforms the American galleries in a way that underscores the importance of continually merging and assembling new works with the collection to tell new stories and to also change the context in which we experience. and understand the works that we knew before. Thank you.