Art History

150 Thomas Cole Images Now Online

admin

The Thomas Cole Historic Site is substantially increasing its online presence with the launch of a new interactive website where visitors can see Thomas Cole’s paintings in a new way, enabling a greatly enhanced understanding of the artist and his work.

The most ambitious feature of the new website is the learning portal. Five years in the making, it offers 150 of Thomas Cole’s best-known artworks all in one place. Written by some of the top scholars in the field of American art, it gives you the experience of seeing Cole’s artwork with a team of experts by your side.

High-resolution digital technology reveals details that are not evident in printed reproductions, and the visitor can zoom in closer to the painted surface than would be permissible in a museum. The database of images will continue to grow, eventually becoming as complete a resource as possible for Cole’s artistic output.

Photo: Autumn in the Catskills by Thomas Cole. Oil on wood, 1827.

Thomas Cole Historic Site Gets $1 Million Bequest

admin


The Thomas Cole Historic Site has announced that it has received a bequest of $1,000,000 from the estate of Raymond Beecher (1917–2008), a guiding light in the preservation of the Thomas Cole Site as well as countless other historic properties in the area. The newly established Raymond and Catharine Beecher Memorial Fund will be used for the maintenance of the buildings and grounds of Cedar Grove, the 19th- century home of Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole.

The bequest is restricted to funding the maintenance of the building and grounds of the Thomas Cole Historic Site, and only a portion of the interest may be used each year so that the principal will endure. Were it not for Raymond Beecher, who passed away in October at the age of 91, there might not be a Cedar Grove today. When the property was up for sale and possibly headed for demolition, Beecher put up his own money to buy the property and begin the restoration process. According to Thomas Cole Historic Site Executive Director Elizabeth Jacks, “It might not have happened without him. He led the charge. So we are delighted that his legacy lives on in a way that helps maintain the site he loved so much.”

Raymond Beecher was a soldier, educator, historian, writer, philanthropist, and public servant. He was the Chairman of the Greene County Historical Society and the Greene County Historian for many years. He was a leader in the establishment of the Vedder Library – a collection of important pieces of Greene County history. Beecher was a World War II veteran serving in both Europe and the Pacific. He wrote several books and for many years wrote a weekly column in local newspapers. He was declared a “Greene County Treasure” by the County Legislature in 2007.

Cedar Grove is the historic name for the Thomas Cole Historic Site, a non-profit organization that preserves and interprets the site where the artist Thomas Cole lived, worked, was married, and where he died at the age of 47. Today the site consists of the Federal style brick home (c. 1815) in which Thomas Cole resided with his family, as well as the artist’s original studio building, on five landscaped acres with a magnificent view of the Catskill Mountains.

Photo: Raymond Beecher in the grounds of his beloved Cedar Grove. Photo Richard Philp.

Home On The Hudson:Women and Men Painting Landscapes 1825-1875

admin

Boscobel House and Gardens in Garrison, New York (www.boscobel.org) has opened a new exhibition, Home on the Hudson: Women and Men Painting Landscapes, 1825-1875. This is the second major exhibition in the new state-of-the-art exhibition gallery on the lower floor of the historic Boscobel House. The exhibit, open to all visitors to Boscobel, will be on display through September 7.

The term “Hudson River School” is in wide circulation. It references a group of landscape artists who painted the scenery in and around the Hudson Valley in the years from about the 1825 through 1875, and established themselves as America’s first native school of art. Their artistic careers correspond to an historic moment when New York City was emerging as the economic capital of the country and its center for the arts. Although there have been many books and exhibitions about the Hudson River School, this focused exhibition and its accompanying publication promises a fresh perspective integrating the fine and popular arts of the time.

The curator has taken a two-pronged strategy to the exhibit. First, the focus is shifted away from New York City to the homes of the artists and their patrons up the river- maps their country residences, and links them with their local scenery. Second, Home on the Hudson: Women and Men Painting Landscapes, 1825-1875, expands the canon to include women such as Eliza Pratt Greatorex, Julie Hart Beers, and Julia McEntee Dillon, who are generally excluded from consideration.

The objects and materials featured in the exhibition are specimens of work these artists did in the vicinity of their residences. Included are watercolors, prints, and photographs to complement the spectacular and in some cases little seen oil paintings. Hanging side by side, they demonstrate the kinship that existed among the artists. Even when they shared a subject, however, we discover that the pictures have different looks, as each artist gave their own individual stamp of style and approach.

Home on the Hudson includes a map of the river that pinpoints where the artists lived and the motifs they painted from New York City to Albany. A display case and a website offer a look at illustrated guide books that instructed painters in the importance of particular sites, along with 19th century ferry and train schedules. Prints add another important dimension to the exhibit. They were less expensive and therefore more commonly owned by 19th century Americans: art for the middle class. Selections are included from The Hudson River Portfolio which consists of twenty hand-colored aquatints. Such portfolios established the canon of places that the painters followed in their work. The exhibit also features Fanny Palmer, the woman who made more prints for Currier & Ives than any other artist in the firm.

“Home on the Hudson” refers not only to the dwellings of the artists but also to the domestic settings where these landscapes hung and how the paintings functioned within interior spaces. A folding screen is decorated with a view of the river at Albany, a variation on the theme of landscape pictures as decorative objects. Painted china and a range of domestic objects that carried Hudson River imagery from fine arts into the domestic arts are also showcased.

Most exhibitions of Hudson River art are held far from the landscape that gave rise to it, and therefore lack specificity of place. Situated directly on the river just opposite West Point, a frequently painted view, Boscobel gives visitors the opportunity to move from the natural belvedere on the grounds into the galleries to see the scenery portrayed. This is an important opportunity for viewers to compare and contrast physical motif with paintings and prints inspired by the landscape.

The run of Home on the Hudson is perfectly timed to coincide with the 400th Anniversary of Henry Hudson’s discovery &#8211 while sailing in his ship the Half Moon &#8211 of the river that bears his name. Some of the material in the exhibition will manifest this historical event.

The Exhibition Gallery at Boscobel, over 1200 square feet in size, will be open during regular Boscobel hours, Wednesday – Monday, 9:30am-5pm. Admission for House tour, Grounds and the Exhibition Gallery is $16 for adults- $12 for seniors- and $7 for children. Admission for the Grounds and the Exhibition Gallery only is $12, children (6-14) $5. From June 16-September 6 the Exhibition Gallery will remain open until a half hour before curtain time to accommodate attendees at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival performances, at a special fee of $5.

Home On The Hudson: Women and Men Painting Landscapes 1825-1875 runs from June 6 through Sept. 7, 2009 at Boscobel House & Gardens, 1601 Route 9D, Garrison, NY. For more information please call 845-265-3638 or visit www.boscobel.org.

Home on the Hudson: Women and Men Painting Landscapes, 1825-1875 has been organized by guest curator Katherine Manthorne, Prof. of Art History, Graduate Center, City University of New York, and students from her Art History Seminar.

Photo: Julie Hart Beers, Hudson River at Croton Point, 1869- Oil on canvas-

Courtesy Hawthorne Fine Art, Collection of Nick Bulzacchelli

In Search of the Picturesque at the Adirondack Museum

admin

Nineteenth century armchair travelers and well-to-do American tourists eagerly read published travel guides and narratives, which often featured paintings reproduced as engravings. These images helped advance an artist’s reputation and marketability, and also shaped travelers’ expectations of the Adirondack wilderness. The Adirondack Museum&#8216-s Chief Curator Laura Rice will lead visitors in search of the picturesque through the museum’s paintings, prints, rare maps, and photographs, many of which have never been exhibited during an illustrated program entitled &#8220In Search of the Picturesque: Landscape and Tourism in the Adirondacks, 1820-1880&#8243- at the Adirondack Museum on Monday, July 6, 2009.

The first offering of the season in the Adirondack Museum’s Monday Evening Lecture series, the presentation will be held in the Auditorium at 7:30 p.m. There is no charge for museum members. Admission is $5.00 for non-members.

Rice will discuss how guidebook authors reinforced visual messages by using painterly language to describe scenes travelers would encounter along a given route. The visual and descriptive imagery promoted the Adirondacks as a public treasure, contributed to a national understanding of wilderness as evidence of God’s hand in creation, and fostered the development of wilderness as a national icon and reflection of the American character.

The Adirondack Museum introduced a new exhibit in 2009, &#8220A &#8216-Wild, Unsettled Country’: Early Reflections of the Adirondacks,&#8221 that showcases paintings, maps, prints, and photographs illustrating the untamed Adirondack wilderness discovered by early cartographers, artists, and photographers.

Laura Rice joined the staff of the Adirondack Museum in 2003. She had previously served as a Curator, Museum Educator, and Consultant at a number of other museums. Ms. Rice holds a Master of Arts degree from the University of Pennsylvania in American Civilization with an emphasis on Museum Studies. She is the author of the award-winning book Maryland History in Prints: 1752 &#8211 1900, a history of the state of Maryland based on selected images in the Maryland Historical Society Print Collection.

Photo: Untitled: Wolf Jaw Mountain, by Horace Wolcott Robbins, Jr., 1863.

Guided Hikes of Hudson River School Locations

admin

Cedar Grove, the Thomas Cole National Historic Site has announced a series of guided hikes to the nearby places that inspired Thomas Cole and fellow artists of the Hudson River School. On the hikes you will see the views that appear in some of the most beloved landcape paintings of the 19th-century and hear stories that bring their history to life. The hikes range from easy walks to moderately vigorous climbs. All hikers will receive a copy of the Hudson River School Art Trail Guide, a new 48-page book with full-color illustrations of the paintings that were inspired by the sites along the trail. The book includes an introduction by Kevin Avery, curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it is published by the Thomas Cole Historic Site. The book will be available for sale in our visitor center starting in mid-June.

Each hike is limited to twelve people and they depart from the Thomas Cole Historic Site at 9am. Hikes designated as &#8220Easy&#8221 are approximately two hours in length. Those designated as &#8220Moderate&#8221 are closer to four hours. Each of the guided hikes also includes a guided tour of the Thomas Cole Historic Site at the end of the hike. The total price per person: $15, or $10 for members.

Here is a schedule of the hikes:

June 6: Sunset Rock and the Catskill Mountain House (Moderate)

July 18: Kaaterskill Falls and the Catskill Mountain House (Moderate)

August 1: The Catskill Mountain House and North-South Lake (Easy)

September 5: Kaaterskill Falls and the Catskill Mountain House (Moderate)

October 3: Sunset Rock and the Catskill Mountain House (Moderate)

Thomas Cole National Historic Site Seeks Volunteers

admin

Cedar Grove, the Thomas Cole National Historic Site is seeking volunteers to conduct on-site school programs during the 2009-2010 school year. The schedule and time commitment are very flexible although a brief training will be held June 5 and 6, 2009. School Programs Docents impart meaningful information about the life, relationships and works of the 19th-century artist Thomas Cole through hands-on activities catered to each grade level and subject area. To get involved contact Education Coordinator Gregory Rosenthal at 518-943-7465 ext. 2, or at [email protected] . Individual informational meetings will be held May 28-31.

@thomascole.org>

New Pre-1830s America Fellowship

admin

The C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience and the John Carter Brown Library are pleased to announce a new research and writing fellowship that may be of interest to members of the list. The Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellowship supports work by academics, independent scholars and writers working on significant
projects relating to the literature, history, culture, or art of the Americas before 1830. The fellowship is also open to filmmakers, novelists, creative and performing artists, and others working on projects that draw on this period of history.

The fellowship award supports two months of research (conducted at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, R.I.) and two months of writing (at Washington College in Chestertown, Md). Housing and university privileges will be provided. The fellowship includes a stipend of $5,000 per month for a total of $20,000.

Deadline for applications for the 2010 fellowship year is *July 15, 2009*. For more information and application instructions, visit the Starr Center’s website at http://starrcenter.washcoll.edu.

Wild, Unsettled Country At The Adirondack Museum

admin

The Adirondack Museum has announced a new exhibit, A &#8216-Wild, Unsettled Country’: Early Reflections of the Adirondacks, that will look at the early efforts to convey the Adirondacks visually to the wider world. The exhibit will open on May 22, 2009 &#8211 meaning that year-round Adirondack Park residents should be able to catch the exhibit for free the last week of May.

The first Europeans to see the Adirondack landscape of northern New York State came to explore, to document important military operations and fortifications, or to create maps and scientifically accurate images of the terrain, flora, and fauna.
These early illustrations filled practical needs rather than aesthetic ones.

The exhibition will showcase approximately forty paintings from the museum’s exceptional art collection, including works by Thomas Cole, John Frederick Kensett, William Havell, John Henry Dolph and James David Smillie.

Also featured are fifty of the engravings and lithographs of Adirondack landscape paintings that brought these images to a wider audience and provided many Americans with their first glimpse of the &#8220howling wilds&#8221 that were the Adirondack Mountains.

While tourists were flocking to Saratoga Springs, N.Y. in the 1830s, few ventured north into the &#8220lofty chain of granite&#8221 visible from Lake George. One guidebook described the mysterious forms as &#8220a wild repulsive aspect.&#8221 Little was known of these yet-unnamed mountains.

In 1836, the New York State legislature authorized a survey of the state’s natural resources. Artist Charles Cromwell Ingham was asked to join geologists Ebenezer Emmons and William C. Redfield during one of the first exploratory surveys. During the trip, he painted The Great Adirondack Pass, &#8220on the spot.&#8221 The original painting will be shown in the exhibition.

The exhibit will also include photographs-stereo views and albumen prints-sold as tourist souvenirs and to armchair travelers. William James Stillman took the earliest photos in the exhibition in 1859. These rare images are the first photographic landscape studies taken in the Adirondacks. Photos by Seneca Ray Stoddard will also be displayed.

Significant historic maps will illustrate the growth of knowledge about the Adirondack region. In 1818, it was still a mysterious &#8220wild, barren tract&#8230-covered with almost impenetrable Bogs, Marshes & Ponds, and the uplands with Rocks and evergreens.&#8221 By 1870, the Adirondacks had become a tourist destination with clearly defined travel routes, hotels, beaches, and camps.

&#8220A &#8216-Wild, Unsettled Country’&#8221 will be on exhibit in the Lynn H. Boillot Art Galleries. The space includes the Adirondack Museum Gallery Study Center &#8211 a resource for learning more about American art. In addition to a library of reference books, a touch screen computer allows visitors to access images from the museum’s extensive fine art collection.

The Gallery Study Center will include a media space as part of the special exhibit. The documentary film &#8220Champlain: The Lake Between&#8221 will be shown continuously. The film, part of the Lake Champlain Voyages of Discovery project, has aired on Vermont Public Television in recent months.

&#8220A &#8216-Wild, Unsettled Country’&#8221 is not just for adults. Family-friendly elements include Looking at Art With Children &#8211 a guide for parents as they investigate the arts with youngsters- the Grand Tour Guide &#8211 a colorful and engaging map that encourages exploration of the Adirondack sites shown in the paintings- and ten different Wild About! guidebooks that urge kids to be &#8220wild&#8221 about maps, prints, history, and more.

Photo caption: View of Caldwell, Lake George, by William Tolman Carlton, 1844. Collection of the Adirondack Museum.

Len Tantillo on Painting The Hudson Valley: History and Process

admin

Len Tantillo, an artist born and raised in upstate New York, will speak on &#8220Painting the Valley: History and Process,&#8221 this Sunday, April 26, 2009 at 2pm at the Albany Institute of History and Art. Tantillo is New York’s premiere painter of historical subjects.

In 1980, Tantillo was commissioned to depict a series of 19th-century structures from
archeological artifacts and historic documents. Similar projects followed, many of which were located along the banks of the Hudson River near Albany. In 1984, Tantillo left commercial art and began the full-time pursuit of fine art. He has spent the last 25 years creating numerous historical and marine paintings, which have continued to draw a wide audience. Tantillo’s work shows the combined influence of the luminists of the 19th century and the great marine artists of the past.

You can see much of his work on the web here.

Passing as Black: A Pioneer of American Alpine Climbing

admin

There was an interesting review of Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line by Martha A. Sandweiss in the New York Times Book Review yesterday. The book is about Clarance King, first director of the United States Geological Survey (USGS), American alpine climbing pioneer and author who passed as black, married a former slave, and lived two lives from his home base in New York City.

Passing Strange meticulously — sometimes too meticulously- the book can be plodding — recounts the unlikely convergence of two lives: King was born in 1842 in Newport, R.I., to parents of longstanding American stock, and Ada Copeland was born a slave in Georgia, months before Confederate guns fired on Fort Sumter. Copeland, like most slaves, is woefully underdocumented- we know that she somehow became literate, migrated to New York in the 1880s and found a job in domestic service. King, by contrast, is all but overdocumented- after schooling, he went west as a surveyor, summing up 10 years of work in two books, including the 815-page “Systematic Geology,” which told, one historian said, “a story only a trifle less dramatic than Genesis.”

The pair met sometime around 1888, somewhere in bustling New York. By telling Copeland he was “James Todd,” a Pullman porter from Baltimore, King implied his race- a white man could not hold such a job. They married that year (though without obtaining a civil license), settling in Brooklyn and then, as Copeland had five children, Flushing, Queens. All the while King maintained residential club addresses in Manhattan, where colleagues knew him as an elusive man about town. Living a double life is costly, and King’s Western explorations never quite delivered returns, so the Todds were always broke.

King was among the first to climb some of the highest peaks of the Sierra Nevada range in the late 1860s and early 1870s and wrote Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, which includes accounts of his adventures and hardships there.

According to The Literature of Mountain Climbing in America (1918):

The beginnings of mountaineering in America have to be looked for mainly in early histories and narratives of travel, though the first ascent in the Canadian Rockies is chronicled in the supplement to a botanical magazine. The first magazine article upon American mountains seems to be Jeremy Belknap&#8216-s account of the White Mountains, printed in the American Magazine in Philadelphia in February, 1788. The first book was Joel T. Headley’s The Adirondack, published in 1849. The Alpine Journal of England, the earliest of such magazines, had a short account of a climb in Central America in its first volume, 1864, and in the third volume, 1867, there was an account of an ascent of Mt. Hood. The first book devoted to alpine climbing in America was Clarence King’s Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada.

As an aside, among the men who were associated with Clarence King was his good friend, artist John Henry Hill. Hill accompanied King on two expeditions west (1866 and 1870) as a staff artist but his New York claim to fame is his work on the Adirondacks which he first visited in the 1860s. He camped and sketched throughout the Adirondacks, and from 1870 to 1874, lived in a cabin he dubbed &#8220Artist’s Retreat&#8221 that he built on Phantom Island near Bolton’s Landing, Lake George. During one winter, Hill’s brother, a civil engineer, visited and the two men set out on the ice to survey the narrows and make one of the first accurate maps of the islands which Hill than made into an etching “surrounding it with an artistic border representing objects of interest in the locality.” On June 6, 1893 Phantom Island was leased by the Forest Commission to prominent Glens Falls Republican Jerome Lapham.

His journal and much of his work is held by the Adirondack Museum, and additional works can be found at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Brooklyn Museum of Art, New-York Historical Society, and the Columbus Museum of Art.