January 2011

Under the darkly glowing roil of a furious sky, desperate people driven before the blast struggle uphill from despair toward hope. Hope takes the form of Richard Nxon in a white trench coat. In December 1956 the Vice President visited Austria’s Hungarian border, where a refugee camp was helping cope with the two hundred thousand Hungarians who had fled the savage Soviet repression of their three-month revolt. The event inspired the expatriate Hungarian artist Ferenc Daday to produce an astonishing anachronism, a grand allegorical painting eleven feet long . The San Francisco Chronicle ’s, critic dismissed the work as “Stalinoid ‘social realism.’” But surely it has at least as much to do with Benjamin West’s Death of Wolfe . In any event, nobody can dispute the claim of a member of the Nixon Presidential Library that it is “one of the biggest oil paintings in the Los Angeles area. It joined the library’s collections last August.

Moving wholly from city to country, and farther into the realm of folk art, we come to a landscape by Frederick J. Sykes (1851–1926). Unknown until last year, when the New York gallery of Hirschl & Adler mounted his first show (he never got one during his lifetime), Sykes was born in England but by the 1870s had established himself in Brooklyn, where his mother ran a boardinghouse. During the 1890s he was painting along the Hudson, where he came upon this stand of pines. Although Sykes would likely have been highly offended to receive a compliment on it, a strain of naivete gives his works their charm. Many of them are shot through with a strange, metallic light, anticipating both Maxfield Parrish and science fiction, and there is something vaguely unsettling about this still, sunny scene with its implacable shadows, its tortuously entwined branches, and its venetian-blind greens.

The country houses of northern Italy usurped the English architectural imagination in the 1830s and ours a decade or so later. In the years before the Civil War, handsome villas were going up all over, and despite its folk-art touches (the two-foot-tall owners), this rendering is a fine example of the vogue. If this particular house was ever built, it probably was in Connecticut. But no record of it seems to have survived, and it may merely have been an exercise in the style that every architect of the day had to master if he wanted to get ahead.

We are looking down Broadway on a fine day in I860. In certain ways the unknown artist has been highly literal: Thomas Y. Crowell, the publisher, is in business in the proper place (and will continue to turn out books for another 130 years before finally going under), and across the way the Astor House wears a suit of striped awnings. We know the year, and even the month—June—because P. T. Barmim has hung his museum with banners heralding Oriental exhibits to mark the arrival of Japan’s first delegation to America. But despite such concrete reporting, this marvelous Broadway, with its crystalline light, its broad and sharp-edged vistas, has more to do with Ganaletto’s Venice. In reality, the pell-mell thoroughfare always pretty much looked as if it were under bombardment. It still does.

The ubiquity of the photograph has somehow failed to diminish trompe l'oeil’s fascination—in fact, rather the reverse is true—and nobody handles the medium with more eerie skill than Keung Szeto. Born in Canton in 1948, he gained his M.F.A. from New York’s Pratt Institute in 1979. Szeto has carried John Peto’s empty canvases about as far as they will go—one of his works features a single matchbook stuck to a black surface—but this example is so shaggy with persuasive tape that it’s impossible to pass by without feeling one’s hand twitch with the desire to touch it.

John Frederick Peto apparently painted the card rack for himself: the letter is addressed to him at 1123 Chestnut Street, in the heart of Philadelphia’s artist community, where he lived in 1880 and 1881. This is a relatively cheerful composition for Peto. As the artist’s fame failed to grow with the passing years, his trompe l’oeil scenes become more forlorn and depopulated, their contents increasingly meager—frayed twists of string, burnt matches, scraps of paper. His contemporary William Harnett chose to include handsome things like violins and game birds in his trompe l'oeils and thus earned the greater glory in his day. But to an era whose sensibilities are more attuned to the vacancies of the abstract and the plaintive poetry of the commonplace, it is Peto who seems the greater artist.

We don’t know who this impressive man is, but from the day a curator at Philadelphia’s Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies showed him to us, we’ve wanted to. The painter has been identified—he is Joseph Whiting Stock, from Massachusetts—and the newspaper is the abolitionist Liberator . Possibly the subject is Richard Johnson, the paper’s New Bedford agent in 1848; perhaps a reader can give a name to this man, who clearly meant to make a difference in his time.

We don’t know who this impressive man is, but from the day a curator at Philadelphia’s Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies showed him to us. we’ve wanted to. The painter has been identified—he is Joseph Whiting Stock, from Massachusetts—and the newspaper is the abolitionist Liberator . Possibly the subject is Richard Johnson, the paper’s New Bedford agent in 1848; perhaps a reader can give a name to this man, who clearly meant to make a difference in his time.

August 12, 1898: at the cud of a war of minute duration and immense consequences, the representatives of the United States and Spain put their names to the armistice that makes Cuba independent, cedes us Puerto Rico, and allows American troops access to the Philippines, where in a series of notably ugly little campaigns they will in time put down an uprising that began against the Spanish. The industrialist Henry Clay Frick gave the painting—by the French artist Theobald Chartran—to the White House, whose occupant, Theodore Roosevelt, declared it “a beauty.” Standing before the window in his Cabinet Room. President McKinley looks majestically down at Secretary of State William R. Day. The man signing the treaty seems somber in defeat, but in fact, it’s no skin off his nose: he is Jules Cambon, the French ambassador to the United States, acting on behalf of Spain.