Columbus Museum of Art » Nineteenth-Century American

King Lake, California

scott — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 17:55:06 +0000

Albert Bierstadt grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts, studied painting in Germany, and established a studio in New York City. He first traveled to the American West in 1859. The landscapes he created later in his studio thrilled easterners with the awesome beauty of the western wilderness. He often combined in one painting the features of different places he had visited. Despite a title that suggests a specific locale, King Lake, California is actually a composite view, inspired by both the Sierra Nevadas and the area that is now Yosemite National Park.

The Cascatelli, Tivoli, Looking Towards Rome

scott — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 17:52:52 +0000

Thomas Cole was born in Bolton-le-Moor, Lancashire, England. In 1818 the Cole family immigrated to the United States, and Cole spent his first year in the U.S. working as an engraver in Philadelphia. In 1820 he joined his family in Steubenville, Ohio, where he learned the rudiments of oil painting from an itinerant painter and where he also designed wallpaper for his father’s factory. In 1823 he returned to Philadelphia, where he studied paintings at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and developed his landscape technique. Cole is the leading figure in what art historians came to call the Hudson River school of landscape painters. As members of the first indigenous American school of painting, the Hudson River artists were not formally allied, but they painted works of similar subjects with a shared visual “vocabulary.” Cole is known for both his pristine American landscapes and landscapes such as this one, in which the ruins hint at the decline of great art and civilization in Europe.

Weda Cook

scott — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 16:45:24 +0000

Along with Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins is the most celebrated American Realist painter of the nineteenth century. Eakins is also one of the great nineteenth-century portrait painters. He studied with Jean-Léon Gérôme at the French Academy and taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He insisted that his students develop a rigorous knowledge of anatomy for figure-painting, and he also emphasized the importance of portraying a sitter’s emotional and psychological state. Here, Eakins has painted a popular Philadelphia contralto as distant, fragile, and sad.

After the Hunt

scott — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 16:42:06 +0000

William Michael Harnett worked in the tradition of trompe l’oeil (meaning “deceives the eye”), a form of painting popular since antiquity, because viewers are fascinated by the overwhelming realism of the painted illusions. Between 1880 and 1886, while in Europe, Harnett painted four versions of this arrangement of hunting equipment hanging on a wooden door. When he returned to New York City, he became the most popular still-life painter in America. Although these still-lifes were popular, they were rarely taken seriously by the American art world, and they often hung in bars and saloons. Harnett sold the fourth and largest of this series to Theodore Stewart for his famous New York City saloon.

Marsh Scene: Two Cattle in a Field

scott — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 16:39:38 +0000

A peripatetic painter, Martin Johnson Heade traveled to the tropics and along the East Coast of the United States. The modest reputation he achieved during his lifetime was based in part on his scenes of marshes along the eastern seaboard. These are excellent examples of a poetic kind of American landscape painting that was later called Luminism. This style is characterized by a realistic portrayal of light and atmosphere and by a glowing radiance with no trace of brushwork. Heade’s paintings are his meditation on the mysteries of God and nature—an attempt to understand the natural world by a precise rendering of its aspects. This view most probably depicts the marshes of Hoboken, New Jersey.

Haymaking

scott — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 16:37:01 +0000

Winslow Homer, one of America’s foremost Realist painters in the nineteenth century, is still one of America’s best- known artists. He took up oil painting during the Civil War, after working as a freelance illustrator for magazines, including Harper’s Weekly. Haymaking is a remarkable example of his ability to capture the crispness and clarity of light. After the years of national crisis, this prosperous and hale young farmer was a welcome personification of America’s abiding faith in peace and plenty, a figure who reassured viewers about the future health and productivity of the nation.

Sunset at Montclair

scott — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 15:30:17 +0000

George Inness was profoundly influenced by painters of the French Barbizon school, the first group of artists who painted outdoors in an attempt to capture natural light on canvas. Inness was especially influenced by the work of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Theodore Rousseau, and he sought, as they did, to express the poetic qualities of the landscape. In the 1860s, after Inness became a convert to the Swedenborgian belief in a separate spiritual world, his images became more ethereal, the atmosphere denser, and the mood quieter. During the latter part of his life, Inness lived in Montclair, New Jersey, where this image was painted.

Carmela Bertagna

scott — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 15:27:56 +0000

John Singer Sargent was born in Florence, Italy, to American parents, and he trained as a painter in Italy and Paris. Eventually, he became the most celebrated portrait painter of the newly rich of the industrial age on both sides of the Atlantic. Sargent was a great admirer of the Baroque masters Frans Hals and Diego Velázquez. Like their work, Sargent’s also is characterized by a bravura technique and vigorous but controlled brush- work. Sargent’s style has an international flavor, as seen by the model here who evokes a Mediterranean setting, although her address is in Paris (see lower left corner). The dedication at the upper left is to Paul Poirson, Sargent’s landlord and patron, to whom the artist may have given the painting.

Still Life

scott — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 14:47:42 +0000

Severin Roesen, who was probably trained in Germany, was one of the more ambitious and prolific painters of still-lifes in mid-nineteenth-century America. In 1848, he immigrated to the United States, where he painted in New York and Pennsylvania. This still life, small by the artist’s usual measure, is typical of the good life in America. Everything is casually but artfully arranged. The compote, found in many of the artist’s paintings, is fanciful and amusing. Vines and stems tie the parts together and frame the whole. A single tendril extends over the ledge to form the artist’s signature with the initial S inside the R.