Corcoran Gallery of Art: American Paintings to 1945

Corcoran Gallery of Art: American Paintings to 1945rt
Sarah Cash, Editor
This landmark publication—which comprises the present volume and a companion online component featuring exhaustive documentation on individual paintings—is the first to authoritatively catalogue and interpret one of the finest and most renowned collections of historic American paintings in the world. The two-part publication offers both art historians and the general public access to the most comprehensive and up-to-date research on the museum’s American paintings, while highlighting the Corcoran’s commitment to the study and display of its permanent collection.
America’s first art museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art was founded in 1869 by the wealthy Washington, D.C. banker and philanthropist William Wilson Corcoran (1798–1888). The museum was established from the private collection Corcoran began in about 1850, and since that time its American paintings collection has grown to more than five hundred works dating from 1718 to 1945. These holdings include a remarkable number of iconic works in all genres of American painting. This list includes Samuel F. B. Morse’s The House of Representatives (1822); Rembrandt Peale’s Washington before Yorktown (1824–25); Thomas Cole’s The Departure and The Return (1837); Frederic Edwin Church’s Niagara (1857); John Singer Sargent’s En route pour la pêche (1878); Thomas Eakins’s Singing a Pathetic Song (1881); Albert Bierstadt’s The Last of the Buffalo (1888); George Bellows’s Forty-two Kids (1907); and Aaron Douglas’s Into Bondage (1936). The collection also boasts outstanding breadth and depth in Hudson River School painting, nineteenth-century portraiture and genre painting, American Impressionism, and early twentieth-century realism.
The Corcoran’s long and illustrious history of collecting and sup- porting American art is comprehensively examined for the first time in the introduction to this book. This essay traces the life and collecting interests of William Wilson Corcoran, his remarkable support of art and artists in his native city, and the founding and growth of his crowning achievement, the museum that bears his name. Following Corcoran’s death in 1888, the institution grew to encompass a school of art (today the Corcoran College of Art + Design) and much expanded collections and exhibitions. The history of the museum’s American paintings collection is discussed within the context of American art patronage and institutional collecting.
The ninety-eight annotated essays by both prominent and emerging scholars of American art present 102 of the most significant works in the collection and are accompanied by full-page color plates as well as comparative illustrations. The remaining 422 paintings are documented with complete curatorial data (artist, title, date, medium, dimensions, credit line, and accession number) and black-and-white thumbnail illustrations. The online component of the catalogue, found on the Corcoran Gallery of Art website, provides searchable access to the extensive scholarly apparatuses that underpin this volume’s ninety- eight essays on the featured paintings; the apparatuses include images, inscriptions, technical notes, references, exhibition histories, related works, and frame information.
Sarah Cash has been Bechhoefer Curator of American Art at the Corcoran Gallery of Art since 1998. She organized the exhibition Sargent and the Sea (2009) and edited and coauthored the accompanying catalogue. She has organized several other exhibitions at the Corcoran, on subjects as diverse as Albert Bierstadt, Norman Rockwell, and Gilded Age paintings of women. She authored American Treasures of the Corcoran Gallery of Art (2000) and contributed essays to A Capital Collection: Masterworks from the Corcoran Gallery of Art (2002). Among her exhibitions and catalogues prior to arriving at the Corcoran were Ominous Hush: The Thunderstorm Paintings of Martin Johnson Heade (1994) and Thomas Eakins and the Swimming Picture (1996); both were projects at the Amon Carter Museum. Cash previously held curatorial positions there and at the National Gallery of Art, and directed the Maier Museum of Art at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College before arriving at the Corcoran. She received her M.A. from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art.
Emily D. Shapiro is an independent scholar who has served as assistant curator of American art at the Corcoran and as curator of fine and decorative arts at George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate & Gardens. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in art history from Stanford University. Her publications include articles on genre and history painting in the journal American Art (2003 and 2011) and an essay in the exhibition catalogue George de Forest Brush: The Indian Paintings (2008). She is publication manager, editor, and a contributing author for Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s inaugural collection publication (forthcoming 2011).
Lisa Strong is Manager of Curatorial Affairs at the Corcoran and previously served as Project Manager and Research Fellow for this volume. She received her Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University. She served as guest curator for Senti- mental Journey: the Art of Alfred Jacob Miller (2009) at the Amon Carter Museum and authored its accompanying book (2008). Her other publications include The James E. Sowell Collection (2008) as well as essays in Timeless Treasures: Fifty Favorites from the Whitney Gallery of Western Art (2009); Romancing the West: Alfred Jacob Miller in the Bank of America Collection (2010); Bob Kuhn: Drawing on Instinct (forthcoming 2011); and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s inaugural collection publication (forthcoming 2011).
Dare Myers Hartwell spearheaded the technical research for the catalogue. She is the Director of Conservation at the Corcoran, where she has worked since 1983. A painting conservator, Hartwell has developed an expertise in nineteenth- century landscape. She carried out the treatment of Albert Bierstadt’s The Last of the Buffalo and has published articles on this painting and on Bierstadt’s late painting techniques in the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation and other publications. In the 1990s she also researched and carried out the restoration of the Salon Doré, the Corcoran’s eighteenth-century French period room from the hôtel de Clermont in Paris.
Contributing essayists to this volume are Jenny Carson, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, Maryland Institute College of Art; Lee Glazer, Associate Curator of American Art, Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Adam Greenhalgh, Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of Maryland; Franklin Kelly, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, National Gallery of Art, Washington; Susan G. Larkin, independent scholar; Valerie Ann Leeds, independent scholar and Adjunct Curator of American Art, Flint Institute of Arts; Crawford Alexander Mann III, The Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow, Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design; Randall McLean, Curator, Guarisco Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Ellen G. Miles, Curator Emerita, Department of Painting and Sculpture, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Dorothy Moss, Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of Delaware; Asma Naeem, Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of Maryland; Laura Groves Napolitano, Curator, Carpenter Museum, Rehoboth, Mass.; Jennifer Raab, Research Fellow, John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerika- studien, Freie Universität, Berlin; Katherine Roeder, Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of Delaware; Marc Simpson, Associate Director and Lecturer, Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art; Paul Staiti, Professor of Fine Arts on the Alumnae Foundation, Mount Holyoke College; Ann Prentice Wagner, independent scholar; and Jennifer Wingate, Assistant Professor of Fine Arts, St. Francis College.
Jacket Image: Albert Bierstadt (Solingen, Germany, 1830–New York City, 1902),
Mount Corcoran, c. 1876–77 (detail). Oil on canvas, 6011⁄16 × 957⁄8 in. (154.2 × 243.4 cm). Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund, 78.1
For more information: Hudson Hills Press, P.O. Box 205, 3556 Main Street, Manchester, Vermont 05254 802-362-6450 [email protected] www.hudsonhills.com
Distributed to the trade by National Book Network Inc.
Pr ic
ISBN 978-1-55595-361-4
9 7 8 1 5 5 5 9 5 3 6 1 4
ISBN 978-1-55595-361-4 10000
rt
Sarah Cash, Editor
This landmark publication—which comprises the present volume and a companion online component featuring exhaustive documentation on individual paintings—is the first to authoritatively catalogue and interpret one of the finest and most renowned collections of historic American paintings in the world. The two-part publication offers both art historians and the general public access to the most comprehensive and up-to-date research on the museum’s American paintings, while highlighting the Corcoran’s commitment to the study and display of its permanent collection.
America’s first art museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art was founded in 1869 by the wealthy Washington, D.C. banker and philanthropist William Wilson Corcoran (1798–1888). The museum was established from the private collection Corcoran began in about 1850, and since that time its American paintings collection has grown to more than five hundred works dating from 1718 to 1945. These holdings include a remarkable number of iconic works in all genres of American painting. This list includes Samuel F. B. Morse’s The House of Representatives (1822); Rembrandt Peale’s Washington before Yorktown (1824–25); Thomas Cole’s The Departure and The Return (1837); Frederic Edwin Church’s Niagara (1857); John Singer Sargent’s En route pour la pêche (1878); Thomas Eakins’s Singing a Pathetic Song (1881); Albert Bierstadt’s The Last of the Buffalo (1888); George Bellows’s Forty-two Kids (1907); and Aaron Douglas’s Into Bondage (1936). The collection also boasts outstanding breadth and depth in Hudson River School painting, nineteenth-century portraiture and genre painting, American Impressionism, and early twentieth-century realism.
The Corcoran’s long and illustrious history of collecting and sup- porting American art is comprehensively examined for the first time in the introduction to this book. This essay traces the life and collecting interests of William Wilson Corcoran, his remarkable support of art and artists in his native city, and the founding and growth of his crowning achievement, the museum that bears his name. Following Corcoran’s death in 1888, the institution grew to encompass a school of art (today the Corcoran College of Art + Design) and much expanded collections and exhibitions. The history of the museum’s American paintings collection is discussed within the context of American art patronage and institutional collecting.
The ninety-eight annotated essays by both prominent and emerging scholars of American art present 102 of the most significant works in the collection and are accompanied by full-page color plates as well as comparative illustrations. The remaining 422 paintings are documented with complete curatorial data (artist, title, date, medium, dimensions, credit line, and accession number) and black-and-white thumbnail illustrations. The online component of the catalogue, found on the Corcoran Gallery of Art website, provides searchable access to the extensive scholarly apparatuses that underpin this volume’s ninety- eight essays on the featured paintings; the apparatuses include images, inscriptions, technical notes, references, exhibition histories, related works, and frame information.
Sarah Cash has been Bechhoefer Curator of American Art at the Corcoran Gallery of Art since 1998. She organized the exhibition Sargent and the Sea (2009) and edited and coauthored the accompanying catalogue. She has organized several other exhibitions at the Corcoran, on subjects as diverse as Albert Bierstadt, Norman Rockwell, and Gilded Age paintings of women. She authored American Treasures of the Corcoran Gallery of Art (2000) and contributed essays to A Capital Collection: Masterworks from the Corcoran Gallery of Art (2002). Among her exhibitions and catalogues prior to arriving at the Corcoran were Ominous Hush: The Thunderstorm Paintings of Martin Johnson Heade (1994) and Thomas Eakins and the Swimming Picture (1996); both were projects at the Amon Carter Museum. Cash previously held curatorial positions there and at the National Gallery of Art, and directed the Maier Museum of Art at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College before arriving at the Corcoran. She received her M.A. from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art.
Emily D. Shapiro is an independent scholar who has served as assistant curator of American art at the Corcoran and as curator of fine and decorative arts at George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate & Gardens. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in art history from Stanford University. Her publications include articles on genre and history painting in the journal American Art (2003 and 2011) and an essay in the exhibition catalogue George de Forest Brush: The Indian Paintings (2008). She is publication manager, editor, and a contributing author for Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s inaugural collection publication (forthcoming 2011).
Lisa Strong is Manager of Curatorial Affairs at the Corcoran and previously served as Project Manager and Research Fellow for this volume. She received her Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University. She served as guest curator for Senti- mental Journey: the Art of Alfred Jacob Miller (2009) at the Amon Carter Museum and authored its accompanying book (2008). Her other publications include The James E. Sowell Collection (2008) as well as essays in Timeless Treasures: Fifty Favorites from the Whitney Gallery of Western Art (2009); Romancing the West: Alfred Jacob Miller in the Bank of America Collection (2010); Bob Kuhn: Drawing on Instinct (forthcoming 2011); and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s inaugural collection publication (forthcoming 2011).
Dare Myers Hartwell spearheaded the technical research for the catalogue. She is the Director of Conservation at the Corcoran, where she has worked since 1983. A painting conservator, Hartwell has developed an expertise in nineteenth- century landscape. She carried out the treatment of Albert Bierstadt’s The Last of the Buffalo and has published articles on this painting and on Bierstadt’s late painting techniques in the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation and other publications. In the 1990s she also researched and carried out the restoration of the Salon Doré, the Corcoran’s eighteenth-century French period room from the hôtel de Clermont in Paris.
Contributing essayists to this volume are Jenny Carson, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, Maryland Institute College of Art; Lee Glazer, Associate Curator of American Art, Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Adam Greenhalgh, Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of Maryland; Franklin Kelly, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, National Gallery of Art, Washington; Susan G. Larkin, independent scholar; Valerie Ann Leeds, independent scholar and Adjunct Curator of American Art, Flint Institute of Arts; Crawford Alexander Mann III, The Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow, Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design; Randall McLean, Curator, Guarisco Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Ellen G. Miles, Curator Emerita, Department of Painting and Sculpture, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Dorothy Moss, Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of Delaware; Asma Naeem, Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of Maryland; Laura Groves Napolitano, Curator, Carpenter Museum, Rehoboth, Mass.; Jennifer Raab, Research Fellow, John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerika- studien, Freie Universität, Berlin; Katherine Roeder, Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of Delaware; Marc Simpson, Associate Director and Lecturer, Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art; Paul Staiti, Professor of Fine Arts on the Alumnae Foundation, Mount Holyoke College; Ann Prentice Wagner, independent scholar; and Jennifer Wingate, Assistant Professor of Fine Arts, St. Francis College.
Jacket Image: Albert Bierstadt (Solingen, Germany, 1830–New York City, 1902),
Mount Corcoran, c. 1876–77 (detail). Oil on canvas, 6011⁄16 × 957⁄8 in. (154.2 × 243.4 cm). Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund, 78.1
For more information: Hudson Hills Press, P.O. Box 205, 3556 Main Street, Manchester, Vermont 05254 802-362-6450 [email protected] www.hudsonhills.com
Distributed to the trade by National Book Network Inc.
Pr ic
ISBN 978-1-55595-361-4
9 7 8 1 5 5 5 9 5 3 6 1 4
ISBN 978-1-55595-361-4 10000
18 37
18 00
18 60
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. in association with Hudson Hills Press, Manchester and New York
american paintings to 1945
with contributions by
Jenny Carson Sarah Cash Lee Glazer Adam Greenhalgh Franklin Kelly Susan G. Larkin Valerie Ann Leeds Crawford Alexander Mann III Randall McLean Ellen G. Miles Dorothy Moss Asma Naeem Laura Groves Napolitano Jennifer Raab Katherine Roeder Emily Dana Shapiro Marc Simpson Paul Staiti Lisa Strong Ann Prentice Wagner Jennifer Wingate
Corcoran Gallery of Art
For in-depth research and documentation on each of the 102
paintings highlighted in this catalog, please refer to its adden-
dum: Corcoran Gallery of Art: American Paintings to 1945, Scholarly
Apparatus. Please click here to start the download of the 103MB
PDF of the publication.
Major support for this project has been provided by The Henry Luce Founda- tion, Inc.; The Women’s Committee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art; The Getty Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; The Page and Otto Marx, Jr. Foundation; Martha A. Healy; Ambika Kosada, James Atwood, and Richard Atwood in memory of Joyce Rose Atwood; and Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund, Inc.
Published by the Corcoran Gallery of Art 500 Seventeenth Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20006 www.corcoran.org
Published in association with Hudson Hills Press LLC 3556 Main Street, Manchester, Vermont 05254
Distributed in the United States, its territories and possessions, and Canada by National Book Network, Inc. Distributed outside North America by Antique Collectors’ Club, Ltd.
Publisher and Executive Director: Leslie Pell van Breen Founding Publisher: Paul Anbinder
Copyright © 2012 the Corcoran Gallery of Art All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Second printing, 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Corcoran Gallery of Art.
Corcoran Gallery of Art : American paintings to 1945 / Sarah Cash, editor ; in collaboration with Emily Dana Shapiro, Lisa Strong ; with contributions by Jennifer Carson . . . [et al.].
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-55595-361-4 1. Painting, American—Catalogs. 2. Painting—Washington (D.C.)—
Catalogs. 3. Corcoran Gallery of Art—Catalogs. I. Cash, Sarah. II. Shapiro, Emily Dana. III. Strong, Lisa Maria, 1966−. IV. Carson, Jennifer. V. Title. VI. Title: American paintings to 1945. ND205.C582 2011
759.13074'753—dc22 2010042555
Front and back covers: Albert Bierstadt, Mount Corcoran, detail, 141
Page 1: Joseph Blackburn, Portrait of a Gentleman, detail, 49; Gilbert Stuart, George Washington (26.172), detail, 59; Joshua Johnson, Grace Allison McCurdy (Mrs. Hugh McCurdy) and Her Daughters, Mary Jane and Letitia Grace, detail, 63; William Sidney Mount, The Tough Story—Scene in a Country Tavern, detail, 83
Page 2: Frederic Edwin Church, Niagara, detail, 114−15; Alfred Jacob Miller, Election Scene, Catonsville, Baltimore County, detail, 125; George Peter Alexander Healy, Abraham Lincoln, detail, 122; Worthington Whittredge, Trout Brook in the Catskills, detail, 139
Page 3: Worthington Whittredge, Trout Brook in the Catskills, detail, 139; Charles Ulrich, In the Land of Promise, Castle Garden, detail, 167; Ralph Albert Blakelock, Moonlight, detail, 169; Willard LeRoy Metcalf, May Night, detail, 193
Page 12: Albert Bierstadt, Mount Corcoran, detail, 141
Page 46: Willard LeRoy Metcalf, May Night, detail, 193; John Sloan, Yeats at Petitpas’, detail, 201; Frank Weston Benson, The Open Window, detail, 217; Emil Carlsen, The Picture from Thibet, detail, 225
Page 47: Guy Pène du Bois, Pierrot Tired, detail, 239; Aaron Douglas, Into Bond- age, detail, 247; Edward Hopper, Ground Swell, detail, 249
Project Director and General Editor: Sarah Cash Copyedited by Fronia W. Simpson Proofread by Laura Iwasaki Indexed by Candace Hyatt Designed by Jeff Wincapaw Layout by John Hubbard Typeset by Marissa Meyer Color management by iocolor, Seattle Printed and bound in China by Artron Color Printing Co., Ltd.
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Acknowledgments
“Encouraging American Genius”: Collecting American Art at the Corcoran Gallery of Art Sarah Cash
Notes to the Reader
Illustrated List of American Paintings to 1945, Excluding Featured Works
Index
Photographic Credits
Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art + Design Board of Trustees
Contents
6
The Corcoran Gallery of Art’s American Paintings to 1945 is a landmark publica-
tion for this institution. As the first volume in nearly half a century to exten-
sively research, document, and interpret the Corcoran’s outstanding collection
of American paintings, it fills a substantial void in scholarship on our many canoni-
cal…