Yale University Art Gallery’s renowned collection of American fine and decorative arts, one of the finest in the country, is traveling for the first time outside New Haven, Conn. Nearly 200 works from the oldest university art museum in the nation illuminate the nature of the American creative experience from colonial beginnings to its coming of age at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.
On view are paintings by John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, John Trumbull, Edward Hicks, Albert Bierstadt, Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins; silver by Paul Revere and Tiffany; furniture by P.E. Guerin and Alexander Roux; candlesticks by Jeremiah Dummer; and photographs by Eadweard Muybridge and Carleton E. Watkins, among others. The accompanying catalog is ambitious and excellent.
After opening at the Speed Art Museum, “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness: American Art 1660‱893 from the Yale University Art Gallery” is now on view at the Seattle Art Museum through May 24. The tour ends at the Birmingham Museum of Art, October 4 to January 10, 2010.
The exhibition and publication were organized by curator of American paintings and sculpture Helen A. Cooper with senior associate curator of American paintings Robin Jaffee Frank; associate curator of prints, drawings and photographs Elisabeth Hodermarsky and curator of American decorative arts Patricia Kane, with the assistance of former graduate curatorial research assistant Amy Kurtz Lansing.
To tell the tale of a young nation struggling to forge its own identity culturally, politically and geographically, the exhibition explores three central themes: Expressions of Heritage; Citizenship and Democracy; and Cultural and Material Aspirations.
Starting with the arrival of the first English settlers in Jamestown, Va., in 1607, the British North American colonies experienced a steady tide of European immigration and African slaves. Each group brought diverse heritages, which influenced the objects they created in the New World. As the exhibition section on Expressions of Heritage suggests, a distinctive American artistic language eventually emerged from this mix of national and cultural legacies.
In the early days of the republic, portraiture was the preferred form. The earliest group portrait, “The Bermuda Group (Dean Berkeley and His Entourage),” was begun by America’s first professional portrait painter, John Smibert, in 1728 and completed in 1739. The eight figures were involved in an ill-fated attempt to establish a seminary in Bermuda.
Other memorable faces are those of Cotton Mather, Boston scholar and minister, in a mezzotint, 1728, by engraver Peter Pelham, and the Reverend Ammi Ruhamah Robins, a Connecticut cleric, in an unsparing, 1812 oil painting by self-taught itinerant artist Reuben Moulthrop.
Two charmingly naive “Peaceable Kingdom” images by Quaker minister Hicks, dating to 1829″0 and 1845, with Isaiah’s prophecy of God’s kingdom on earth in the foreground and William Penn and a group of Quakers in the background, reflect Hicks’s confidence that a rift within the Society of Friends would be resolved. Other works chronicle fascination with Native Americans.
Outstanding among the decorative objects from this period are Cornelius Vander Burgh’s beaker, dating to 1685, engraved with allegories familiar in Dutch-dominated New York, and a silver cann, 1750, made by Benjamin Le Roux II and engraved by a Huguenot émigré, Joseph Leddel Sr, with biblical scenes from the life of Joseph.
Documenting regional and ethnic differences, there is a standout high chest of drawers, 1765‷0, made in southeastern Pennsylvania, which reflects the influence of English and German cultures, and an ornate cupboard, 1865‱900, owned by the Reverend Timothy Dwight, Yale’s eighth president, which was likely designed by a Connecticut cabinetmaker to look like a much older piece.
From elsewhere in the country are a slat backed child’s chair, 1775‱825, from Louisiana, designed in the French chairmaking tradition, and a Hispanic-oriented chest from New Mexico, 1775‱825, with carved animal and fruit motifs.
The section titled Citizenship and Democracy, covering the period 1775‱865, utilizes a series of powerful broadsides, prints, decorative arts and paintings to showcase how the American struggle for independence from Great Britain found voice in the arts. Americans sought to spread the word about their plight and the righteousness of their cause through political propaganda, such as Revere’s hand colored engraving, “The Bloody Massacre Perpetrated in King-Street Boston on March 5th 1770 by a Party of the 29th Regt.” Depicting an organized line of Red Coats deliberately firing on an unarmed crowd, silversmith/patriot Revere whipped up anti-British sentiment among colonists, helping to elevate the “Massacre” to a major incident leading to the Revolutionary War.
The first artist to immortalize events of the American Revolution was Connecticut’s Trumbull, a member of the new republic’s social and political elite, who responded to prodding from John Adams and Thomas Jefferson with eight scenes of the war. These sermons in paint, intended to convey the moral spirit of the struggle for independence, range from melodramatic views of battles to the Declaration of Independence to George Washington’s resignation from the military. Trumbull painted enlarged versions of four of the Yale paintings for the rotunda of the US Capitol.
To further memorialize the nation’s founding, Trumbull spent five years, beginning in 1789, recording exact likenesses of significant participants: statesmen, military leaders, women, family members and Indian chiefs. Another able painter, Ralph Earl, captured Connecticut’s stalwart, plain man of the people and signer of the Declaration of Independence, Roger Sherman, in a memorable 1775 portrait. It contrasts with Bostonian John Singleton Copley’s 1769 portraits of two of the social elite, Mr and Mrs Isaac Smith, resplendent in European finery. The differing likenesses of Sherman and Smith suggest a cultural divide among colonists.
Following independence, expressions of patriotism, such as the bald eagle and the figure of Liberty in a flowing gown, became national symbols and adorned domestic objects. Everything from furniture (a massive Massachusetts chest-on-chest, 1791) to a gold and steel sword and scabbard (presented to War of 1812 hero Stephen Decatur) to handkerchiefs represent cultural assertions of nationalistic pride.
The Nineteenth Century saw the rise of a “cult of Washington,” with all manner of pictures and decorative arts bearing images of the nation’s “first man.” Trumbull’s 1792 portrayal of a resolute Washington at Trenton, commissioned by the city of Charleston, led the way. Other likenesses of the first president appeared on china, jewelry, snuff boxes, cast iron stoves and fire pumps. One standout, a gilt bronze mantel clock featuring the figure of Washington and symbols of heroism and liberty, was made in Paris, 1809‱9.
Well into the Nineteenth Century, as the realities of politics and governance evolved, Americans grappled with issues of class, race and conflict. George Caleb Bingham, one of the few important artists to run and win political office himself, created images of rough-and-tumble politicking and glimpses of life in frontier Missouri.
William Sidney Mount depicted merchants, musicians and laborers, including African Americans, mingling in scenes of everyday life on Long Island.
The outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 triggered a broad range of artworks, particularly in the North, ranging from a simple milk jug recording a violent encounter between a Union officer and a Secessionist innkeeper, to paintings by Winslow Homer (“In Front of Yorktown,” circa 1863‶6) and Thomas Eakins’s “The Veteran (Portrait of George Reynolds),” probably 1885. Photography, by Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, George N. Barnard and Timothy Sullivan, brought home to the North the immediacy and carnage of the conflict.
The section on Culture and Material Aspirations starts with artworks reflecting “Ambition and Display” †art, furniture and silver †created in response to the growth of wealth through agriculture and Southern plantations, transatlantic and China trade and East Coast businesses.
Among the headliners here are a pair of cluster-column candlesticks, probably 1686, designed by Dummer (the first native-born New England silversmith) that reflect the taste for ostentatious display of the British merchant class that rose to power in the late Seventeenth Century, overshadowing the dominance of the founding Puritans.
Equally impressive is an example of sumptuous tableware, a silver monteith, circa 1705, created by John Coney, the leading early Eighteenth Century Boston silversmith, to chill wineglasses cradled in its scalloped rims.
Also notable are a pair of exquisitely worked gold shoe buckles, 1768‷0, crafted by Myer Myers for a prominent New York attorney known for his opulent style of dress, and a silver fluted teapot, circa 1795, by Revere.
Handsome portraits of wealthy patrons by Peale and others set the context for such outstanding furniture as an ornately carved cupboard, 1675‹0, attributed to Peter Blin of Wethersfield, Conn.; an English-style mahogany side chair made for Hudson Valley elite Robert R. Livingston, 1750‷0; an imposing mahogany desk and bookcase with block and shell façade, 1760‹0, owned by Newport businessman and civic leader John Brown; a 7½-foot-wide neoclassical mahogany sideboard originally belonging to a South Carolina rice planter and a drop-dead bright yellow couch, 1820″0, made in New York City.
Galleries devoted to Education and Discovery feature objects created by artisans to celebrate American intellectual and artistic achievements. Included are self-portraits by Trumbull and Thomas Sully; a likeness of renowned Philadelphia surgeon, Dr D. Hayes Agnew, by Eakins; a moving “Needlework Mourning Picture,” 1809‱0, by a young granddaughter honoring Ezra Stiles, a congregational minister and president of Yale; George Frederic Barker’s remarkable 1864 photo of the surface of the moon; and pioneering, serial photographs of men, women and horses in arrested motion by Muybridge.
The rapid urbanization and industrialization of America in the Nineteenth Century elicited paintings and prints that reflected both optimism about peaceful coexistence between industry and nature and pessimism about the fragile relationship between the two. Landscapes by Frederic E. Church, Martin Johnson Heade and John Kensett portraying rural areas of peace and plenty contrasted with less optimistic, nostalgic canvases by Homer and Eastman Johnson of rural factory workers and cranberry pickers, respectively.
Meanwhile, advancing technology made possible mass production of artisan crafts, providing American consumers with inexpensive quality goods from furniture to tableware. Standout examples: an Eli Terry shelf clock, 1816′5, made in Plymouth, Conn.; a Lambert Hitchcock side chair, from Hitchcocksville, Conn., 1825″2, and a variety of pre-1860s glassware, pottery and metal pitchers from the East Coast and the Midwest.
Under the aegis of Transportation and Moving West, the exhibition explores how new canals and railroads crossing the vast continent, the Gold Rush of 1849 and cross-country communications were celebrated in diverse media. On view are a Fletcher and Gardiner silver covered two-handled urn, Philadelphia, 1830, presented to the president of a canal company; engraved teaspoons, San Francisco, 1849, made of Gold Rush gold; elaborate silver napkin clips from Tiffany & Co.; a Biedermeier-style sewing table, 1870‸0, made by German immigrants in Texas; and an 1875‸5 pitcher made in Brooklyn celebrating expansion to the Pacific Ocean.
Painters and photographers recorded awe-inspiring Western landscapes, exotic peoples and adventurous experiences that astounded Eastern audiences, lured travelers East and encouraged creation of the national park system. On view are paintings by Bierstadt of Yosemite Valley; Worthington Whittredge of the Southwest and Frederic Remington of a Western “cattle war;” lithographs of works by Bingham (“The Jolly Flat Boat Men”); Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait (frontiersmen fighting a grass fire) and John Mix Stanley (panoramic vistas and insights into Native American cultures on the trail from St Paul to Seattle).
Remarkable photographs by Watkins, Muybridge and William Henry Jackson convey views of awe-inspiring Western mountains and waterfalls to the inquisitive populations in the East.
The final galleries take their title from Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s novel, The Gilded Age, whose name became a metaphor for the great wealth, crass materialism and widespread political corruption of the era, 1870‱900.
Newly affluent tycoons built enormous mansions and filled them with fancy furniture, such as an opulent Roux cabinet, a resplendent green sofa made by Guerin and an enormous Kimbel & Cabus parlor cabinet.
Lavish interior decorations, inspired by Japanese models, adorned Cincinnati’s T.J. Wheatley & Company’s earthenware vase; Meriden Britannica Company’s vase and ice urn and Tiffany & Co.’s silver coffeepot.
Gilded Age lives of leisure and sport were recorded in paintings by Homer (croquet), Eakins (watching rowing races and rail hunting), Thomas W. Dewing (women dancing on a lawn) and Charles Courtney Curran (attending a sculpture exhibition). Currier & Ives color lithographs recorded the expansion of major cities.
Corrupt politicians, like Manhattan’s “Boss” Tweed, were brought down by the poison pen satires of Thomas Nast, whose scathing cartoons in newspapers and periodicals are among the most powerful in American history.
The exhibition ends with the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, where American artists more than held their own with international counterparts, underscoring America’s coming of age as a world power.
This exhibition is one of the finest shows of the year, its messages augmented with an outstanding catalog, edited by Cooper and published by Yale University Art Gallery in association with Yale University Press, $75.
The Seattle Art Museum is at 100 University Street. For information, 206-654-3100 or www.seattleartmuseum.org .
