Permanent Collection - Gallery One
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William Sidney Mount
Any Fish Today? 1857 Nineteenth Century Oil on canvas 21 1/4 in. x 16 1/2 in. (53.98 cm x 41.91 cm) Signed and dated, lower right: Wm S. Mount/1857 Gift of the Ida Belle Young Art Acquisition Fund 2011.0004.0002 A native of Long Island, NY, Mount was one of the earliest students at the National Academy of Design, taking classes there in 1826. He studied engravings after the works of the nineteenth-century Scottish artist David Wilkie, as well as Dutch and Flemish genre painters of the seventeenth century. Mount was one of the first and most influential of the mid-nineteenth century American genre painters; his works were engraved and published and his reputation was solidified by this wider exposure. The subject of this painting, a young man peddling a catch of fish to a rural household, was a common one in nineteenth-century American painting. Peddlers were rural subjects that resonated with urban dwellers in an era when both commerce and the dignity of honest labor were idealized as the essence of American character. The young man’s neat dress and the classical composition, his figure framed by the door open to the world beyond, convey the boy’s importance as a symbol of an orderly and prosperous society. |
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Eastman Johnson
(Lovell, Maine, 1824 - 1906, New York, New York) Girl in Landscape with Two Lambs 1875 Nineteenth Century Oil on fiberboard 26 1/4 in. x 21 1/8 in. (66.68 cm x 53.66 cm) Signed and dated, lower right, recto: "E Johnson 1875" Gift of the Ida Belle Young Art Acquisition Fund 2011.0004.0001 One of the most cosmopolitan and sought-after painters of his age, Eastman Johnson gained recognition through a series of charming, seemingly spontaneous images of American rural life, executed in a sophisticated, highly controlled manner. Johnson was part of the generation that followed William Sidney Mount as a genre painter in the late nineteenth century. He trained in Dusseldorf, and subsequently in Holland. During and after the Civil War Johnson painted a series of paintings of women and young children in decorative settings. In 1871, he built a summer home on Nantucket Island, and he began painting there out of doors, capturing the shimmering light and atmosphere. His subjects addressed the Post-Civil War nostalgia for the wholesomeness of rural life and the countryside still unspoiled by the rise of urbanization and industrialization. |
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Mary Edmonia Lewis (aka Edmonia Lewis)
(Greenbush, New York, ca. 1844 - 1907, Brook Green, England) Hiawatha's Marriage 1868 Nineteenth Century Marble 29 1/2 in. x 13 1/8 in. x 11 5/8 in. (74.93 cm x 33.34 cm x 29.53 cm) Signed and dated, proper left, “Edmonia Lewis/ Fecit a Rome 1868” Gift of the Ida Belle Young Art Acquisition Fund 2012.0001.0001-.0002 During her first years in Rome, Edmonia Lewis produced several sculptures related to her Native American heritage that were inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s popular epic poem, "The Song of Hiawatha," published in 1855. These included this figural group showing the warrior Hiawatha and his bride, Minnehaha. This version, dated 1868, is one of at least five that the artist produced between that year and the mid-1870s. Deciphering the content of Lewis’s sculptures inspired by Longfellow’s "The Song of Hiawatha" is complicated by her gender and her Native American heritage. Did she choose the subject popularized by Longfellow to capitalize commercially on the poem, to associate herself with the poem’s protagonist or his bride, to champion her mother’s race, to strengthen her Native American identity (and thus perhaps to marginalize her African- American heritage), or some combination of those and/or other factors? She left no verbal or written commentary on those topics. |
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George Inness
(Newburgh, New York, 1825 - 1894, Bridge of Allan, Scotland) Medfield 1877 Nineteenth Century Oil on canvas 20 in. x 30 in. (50.8 cm x 76.2 cm) Signed and dated, lower right: G. Inness, 1877 Gift of the Ida Belle Young Art Acquisition Fund 2011.0017 George Inness’s paintings of the 1870s are considered some of his most accomplished works. His emphasis during this decade of his long career was to balance virtuoso brushwork with rich, expressive color. By this point, Inness was creating primarily idealized studio compositions based upon field studies and preparatory sources, so this image of a landscape, while titled "Medfield", was most likely a composite of various elements of scenery rather than a record of a specific place. Inness’s relationship with Medfield, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston, began in 1860 as he sought a refuge from the pressures of the art world in New York City. The proximity to Boston gave him access to an active art environment in which Barbizon painting, a French landscape painting style that informed some of Inness’s earlier works, was better accepted and more widely collected than in New York. |
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George Henry Durrie
(New Haven, 1820 - 1863, New Haven) Holidays in the Country, The Cider Party 1853 Nineteenth Century Oil on canvas 22 in. x 30 in. (55.88 cm x 76.2 cm) Signed and dated, lower right: "G.H. Durrie 1853" Gift of the Ida Belle Young Art Acquisition Fund 2010.0015 George Henry Durrie (1820-1863) is best known as a painter of New England winter landscapes in the mid-nineteenth century. Based in New Haven, Connecticut between the 1830s and the late 1850s, ten of the artists landscapes were mass-produced as chromolithographs by Currier and Ives in the 1860s. The prints enhanced Durries reputation in the twentieth-century. Durrie painted a small number of mid-nineteenth century genre scenes shortly before the Civil War. In composition and content they were highly influenced by the works of William Sidney Mount (1807-1868), whose paintings were probably known to him either directly through exhibition or through lithographic reproduction. The subjects, such as that in Holidays in the Country, The Cider Party, show casual interaction among members of the races, projecting an easy camaraderie that belied the social tension of the period. Paintings such as this one were filled with allegory and symbols, such as the drawing and writings on the barn door, and the interaction of the farm animals in the foreground. All these elements, taken together, would have signaled contemporary viewers that this painting conveyed opposition to the Compromise of 1850, a series of legislative acts that was designed to broker peace between the political interests of North and South, but eventually failed, leading to war. |
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Severin Roesen (aka Severin Rösen, S. Rosen)
(Boppard-am-Rhein, Prussia, 1816 - ca. 1872, Williamsport, Pennsylvania (?)) Still Life with Mixed Flowers and Bird's Nest ca. 1851-1859 Nineteenth Century Oil on canvas 34 1/4 in. x 30 1/4 in. (87 cm x 76.84 cm) Gift of the Ida Belle Young Art Acquisition Fund 2012.0017 "Still Life with Mixed Flowers and Bird’s Nest" was most likely painted during the first decade of Roesen’s career when he resided in New York City. Although the painting is neither signed, nor dated, the composition is consistent with many other works that were documented in that decade, and indeed the composition is one he repeated (with slight variations) a number of times. The MMFA’s work is typical in Roesen’s use of the reverse “s” curve composition, beginning at the top with the ruffled pink poppy, extending through the wave of tulips, daisies, dahlia, rose and morning glories, and ending with the bird’s nest at the bottom. The artist models the forms, and suggests the recession into space by making the edges of the peripheral flowers less distinct and placing them in shadow. The painting is typical of Roesen’s approach, with its highly detailed and realistic rendering of the blooms, the heightened color palette, and the shading of the background from the darker area on the proper right to the lighter tone on the left side. Many of the elements in this composition are also frequently repeated in others, including the bird’s nest with three eggs, the bright blue iris on the proper left side of the bouquet, and the stem of pink roses that appears to fall from the container and rests at the edge of the marble ledge. |