One of the finest American portraits, Rembrandt Peale’s remarkable image of his brother, Rubens Peale with a Geranium (fig. 6), frequently hangs in the Stuart gallery. Reflecting the Peale family’s interests in both art and science, this work can be understood as a dual portrait of the sitter and the plant. The two fingers with which Rubens tests the soil are mirrored in the forms of the two sharp buds of the geranium, which seem to reach for the young Rubens’ hair. Accessioned in 1985, this painting was the first acquisition made possible by the Gallery’s primary source for major purchases, the Patrons’ Permanent Fund. Among other important works by the Peale family that have entered the Gallery’s collections since 1980 are Charles Willson Peale’s John Beale Bordley (gift of The Barra Foundation, Inc., 1984), Raphaelle Peale’s A Dessert (gift of Jo Ann and Julian Ganz, Jr., in memory of Franklin D. Murphy, 1999), and James Peale’s Fruit Still Life with Chinese Export Basket (gift of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas M. Evans in honor of the 50th anniversary of the National Gallery of Art, 1990).
The American Galleries
Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Childhood, 1842, oil on canvas, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 1971.16.1
Thomas Cole’s four-part masterpiece, The Voyage of Life, has come to serve as the gateway to the American collections. Consisting of Childhood (fig. 5), Youth, Manhood, and Old Age, his imaginary landscape allegory is deeply rooted in biblical sources as well as in American and British poetry and literature of the romantic era, and it is considered one of the most important and original achievements of his career. The first version of the series, now in the collection of the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, New York, was commissioned in 1839 by a New York banker, Samuel Ward. When Ward died before the commission was completed, a dispute arose as to whether Cole had a right to exhibit the works publicly before delivering them to the Ward family. Cole eventually decided to paint a duplicate set while in Europe, which he completed and exhibited in Rome in 1842. Following his return to the United States, Cole sold this set to a Cincinnati collector. When Cole suddenly died in 1848, the original version was purchased by the American Art-Union, which succeeded in making it one of the most famous American works of the nineteenth century by distributing the series by lottery and arranging for the distribution of 20,000 prints of Youth. The second version was eventually purchased by the National Gallery in 1971 with support from the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund. Other works by Cole to enter the collections more recently include Sunrise in the Catskills in 1989 (gift of Mrs. John D. Rockfeller 3rd, in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the National Gallery of Art) and Italian Coast Scene with Ruined Tower (gift of The Circle of the National Gallery of Art) in 1993.
Following this room devoted to Cole, the most influential landscape painter in the United States in the early nineteenth century, is a gallery devoted to Gilbert Stuart, the most accomplished American portraitist of Federal America. Chief among the Stuart works is the Gibbs-Coolidge set of presidential portraits consisting of iconic images of the first five presidents of the United States. The only surviving set of its kind, it was commissioned by George Gibbs, an amateur geologist from Rhode Island and founder of the American Journal of Science. More than a century after the group was purchased from the Gibbs family by Thomas Jefferson Coolidge in 1872, Coolidge’s great-grandson and namesake bequeathed the Washington and Jefferson portraits to the Gallery. The remaining three paintings in the set were acquired through the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund. Beginning with Andrew Mellon’s initial gift in 1941, the number of works by Stuart in the American collection has grown steadily to forty-two, more than those any other artist except George Catlin.
The views looking west and east of the Stuart gallery are galleries that highlight George Catlin’s Indian paintings and American folk art from the collection of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch. The Garbisch collection was donated over a twenty-seven-year period (from 1953 to 1980) and recognizes the often brilliant contributions to American culture of a vast array of artists—often self-taught and unidentified—who invented their own unique idioms largely outside of the mainstream art institutions of their day. The works by Catlin donated by Paul Mellon in 1965, known collectively as the “Cartoon Collection,” include paintings of North and South American Indians, as well as a series of works Catlin completed for Louis Philippe, king of France, picturing the voyages of the French explorer La Salle in the New World. While many of Catlin’s images serve primarily to document Indian cultures, the rich painterly qualities of portraits such as The White Cloud, Head Chief of the Iowas (fig. 7) also testify to his remarkable artistic talents. Together the Garbisch and Catlin gifts total more than six hundred paintings and represent more than half of all the works in the American painting collections.
The sightlines leading south and east from the Stuart gallery culminate with works that address, obliquely and directly, two of the great military cataclysms of American history: the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. While John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark (fig. 8) primarily relates the story of how young Brook Watson lost his leg while being rescued from a shark attack in Havana harbor in Cuba in 1749, the way Copley dramatically suspends the violent moment in time also suggests how the destinies of America and Britain hung in the balance when he created the painting in 1777. One of the great masterworks of the National Gallery, it was willed by Watson to Christ’s Hospital, an orphanage in London, from whom the Gallery purchased it in 1963 with support provided by the Ferdinand Lammot Belin Fund. Complementing Copley’s vision and commemorating the Civil War is an equally compelling masterpiece placed on long-term loan to the Gallery in 1997: the full-scale plaster cast for Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ memorial to the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment under the command of Robert Gould Shaw.
The most important landscape and marine paintings in the American collections can be seen in a pair of grand, expansive galleries (64 and 67) appropriate to the vast spaces found in many of the works that hang there. This aspect of the collections grew in stature dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s with acquisitions such as Jasper Francis Cropsey’s Autumn—On the Hudson River (gift of the Avalon Foundation, 1963), Frederic Edwin Church’s El Rio de Luz (The River of Light) (gift of the Avalon Foundation, 1965), Cole’s A View of the Mountain Pass Called the Notch of the White Mountains (Crawford Notch) (Andrew W. Mellon Fund, 1967), Cropsey’s The Spirit of War (Avalon Fund, 1978), and John Frederick Kensett’s Beach at Beverly (gift of Frederick Sturges Jr., 1978). Several other significant works now on view were acquired in the last ten years, including Siout, Egypt by Sanford Robinson Gifford (New Century Fund, Gift of Joan and David Maxwell, 1999), The Last Valley—Paradise Rocks by John La Farge (Gaillard F. Ravenel and Frances P. Smyth-Ravenel Fund, 2000), and Second Beach, Newport by Worthington Whittredge (Paul Mellon Fund and Gift of Juliana Terian in memory of Peter G. Terian, 2004).
Also displayed here are two long-lost works: Albert Bierstadt’s Lake Lucerne (gift of Richard M. Scaife and Margaret R. Battle, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the National Gallery of Art, fig. 9) and Asher B. Durand’s The Stranded Ship (gift of Ann and Mark Kington/The Kington Foundation through Millennium Funds). Lake Lucerne, the most ambitious painting of Bierstadt’s early career and a prototype for his great western landscapes of the 1860s, essentially disappeared from public view following the death of the original owner in 1877. Quietly hung in a private home in Rhode Island throughout the twentieth century, its location remained a mystery to scholars until the work was acquired by the Gallery following the owner’s death in 1989. Durand’s The Stranded Ship experienced a similar fate. Prior to its purchase by the Gallery in 2003, this ambitious painting, with its dramatic asymmetrical composition and romantic subject matter in the manner of Cole, had not been exhibited publicly since it was first shown in New York at the National Academy of Design in 1844. It then remained secluded in private hands for more than one hundred and fifty years.
Beginning with Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) in 1943, Winslow Homer, perhaps the most accomplished and popular of all American artists, has come to be represented at the Gallery by so many significant works from almost every phase of his varied career that in 1997 and 2006 the Gallery was able to organize exhibitions of Homer’s work drawn entirely from its own collections. The paintings range from Homer’s poignant study of Civil War camp life, Home, Sweet Home (Patrons’ Permanent Fund, 1997), to his later masterpiece, Right and Left (gift of the Avalon Foundation, 1951, fig. 10), a work the artist suffused with intimations of mortality by having the viewer confronted directly with a flash of shotgun fire; this point was made discernible only by a small touch of red paint in the far background of the image. Also on display is Sparrow Hall, from the John Wilmerding Collection, which may be the only oil painting made by Homer during his pivotal stay in Cullercoats, England, from 1881 to 1882. In addition to these masterworks, the Gallery’s holdings of work by Winslow Homer include extraordinary watercolors given by Ruth K. Henschel in memory of her husband Charles R. Henschel in 1975 and by Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon in 1994.
Several other distinguished genre paintings can be found alongside the works by Homer in gallery 68. Two classic works by George Caleb Bingham depicts aspects of life along the Mississippi River: The Jolly Flatboatmen (on loan from The Manoogian Collection) and Mississippi Boatman (John Wilmerding Collection, 2004). Also on view are two significant recent additions to the Gallery’s American genre paintings by Homer’s great contemporary, Eastman Johnson, Gathering Lilies and On Their Way to Camp (both Paul Mellon Fund and gift of Jo Ann and Julian Ganz, Jr., 2008, fig. 11). The former shows a young woman gracefully picking water lilies from a pond, while the latter presents children participating in the harvesting of maple syrup in Maine. Finally, there is Thomas Eakins’ remarkable rendering—with precise technical attention paid to the details of the boat and the movements of the oarsmen—of two of the most famous rowing champions of their day in their scull on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, The Biglin Brothers Racing (gift of Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, 1953).
In the following gallery (69) is an unusual work by Eakins that falls somewhere between genre and portraiture, Baby at Play (John Hay Whitney Collection, 1982, fig. 12). While ostensibly an informal scene of a child playing with blocks, its life-size scale and heroic classical composition invest the image with a level of seriousness more in keeping with Eakins’ full-length portrait of a noted ophthalmologist installed nearby, Dr. William Thomson (John Wilmerding Collection). Also found here are several works by one of the most accomplished portraitists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, John Singer Sargent. Among these is Sargent’s incisive portrait of Eleanora O’Donnell Iselin (gift of Ernest Iselin, 1964) in which the rich play of blacks in the dress dramatically sets off the sitter’s expressive hands. But perhaps the most notable of the many remarkable portraits found in this gallery is James McNeill Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl (Harris Whittemore Collection, 1943, see fig. 4). This work shocked viewers in Paris at the Salon des Refusés in 1863, in part because it defied the formal rules of grand-manner portraiture by insisting that its beautiful and subtle interplay of white-on-white paint mattered more than the identity of its sitter.
The majority of the still lifes installed in the small cabinet gallery (69A) adjacent to the portrait gallery have been acquired since 1990. Indeed, no other aspect of the Gallery’s collection of American art has seen such dramatic growth in recent years. Major still-life painters of the nineteenth century are well represented with such examples as William Michael Harnett’s The Old Violin (gift of Mr. and Mrs. Richard Mellon Scaife in honor of Paul Mellon, 1993), John Frederick Peto’s For the Track (gift of Jo Ann and Julian Ganz, Jr., in honor of Earl A. Powell III, 1997), and Still Life with Oranges and Goblet of Wine (Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1999); and Martin Johnson Heade’s Giant Magnolias on a Blue Velvet Cloth (gift of the Circle of the National Gallery of Art in commemoration of its tenth anniversary, 1996). Works by lesser-known but brilliant artists include Samuel Lewis’s A Deception (gift of Max and Heidi Barry), Joseph Decker’s Ripening Pears (gift of Ann and Mark Kington/The Kington Foundation and the Avalon Fund, 2004), and John Haberle’s Imitation (New Century Fund, gift of the Amon G. Carter Foundation, 1998). Promised gifts from the collection of the distinguished scholars of American art, William and Abigail Gerdts, will continue to enhance the Gallery’s still-life holdings in the future.
The final American galleries (70 and 71) are devoted to American impressionism and the Ashcan school. Joining earlier donations of Hassam’s Allies Day, May 1917, Chase’s A Friendly Call, John Henry Twachtman’s Winter Harmony (gift of the Avalon Foundation, 1964), and Frank Benson’s Margaret (“Gretchen”) Strong (gift of Elizabeth Clark Hayes, 1992), the recent gifts by Margaret and Raymond Horowitz of three of their finest American impressionist paintings—Julian Alden Weir’s U.S. Thread Company Mills, Willimantic, Connecticut (acquired 1997), Childe Hassam’s Poppies, Isles of Shoals (acquired 1997, fig. 13), and Dennis Bunker’s Roadside Cottage (acquired 2007) —have allowed the Gallery to represent this important movement in American art more comprehensively than ever before. The collections’ three great masterpieces by the most accomplished of the Ashcan school artists, George Bellows, were all given by Chester Dale: Both Members of This Club (acquired 1944), Blue Morning, and The Lone Tenement (both acquired 1962). Together with Bellows’ recently conserved New York (Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1986), these dynamic images of early twentieth-century urban life provide a dramatic conclusion to the impressive overview of American art history now available to visitors to the West Building.