January 2011

Julius Stewart was ten years old in 1865 when his family moved from Philadelphia to Paris, where he lived for the rest of his life. Although he studied painting under the city’s best teachers and his work was accepted early by the Paris Salon, he was never considered anything but American, and he drew many of his subjects from among the expatriates living in Paris, including Vanderbilts, Drexels, and James Gordon Bennett. The people in his 1883-84 canvas Five O’Clock Tea , right, have not been identified, but they, too, are believed to be American, and the man in the upper-left corner may be the artist himself. Stewart’s appeal, according to one contemporary, was that “he never paints a woman to be of lower rank than that of baroness, and all his young girls look like daughters of duchesses.” The critic could well have been describing this canvas; in it even the dog seems to lay claim to noble lineage.

Almost nothing is known about this oddly solemn déjeuner sur I’herbe except that it must have been painted around 1870. It turned up in an estate in Florida, but the landscape and the tree draped in Spanish moss look more like what you might find in Georgia or South Carolina. The picnic hampers carried to the scene seem to have contained nothing but wine, yet the mood is scarcely one of revelry. Perhaps one of the gentlemen pictured is a winemaker assessing his vintage. In any case, we find the work intriguing, and we encourage readers who can shed light on its mystery to write and let us know.

Henry Bacon spent most of his life in London and Paris, recording the doings of the moneyed in slick, cheerful canvases. But as a young man he served in the 13th Massachusetts Volunteers in the Civil War and was wounded in action. Early in the war he came upon a huge old chestnut tree, eighteen feet around, stripped of its branches and turned into a signal station—part of a line that ran from the Maryland Heights to Washington. The flagmen, sick of wearying their arms passing along inconsequential news, distilled all the trivia they were being handed into a single serviceable message that became immortal and that gave Bacon the title for his painting: “All Quiet on the Potomac.”

The gold dome of the Statehouse in the background of this wintry scene identifies it as the Boston Common, painted in 1893 by Edward Simmons. Simmons devoted his career to murals, although between commissions he liked to try landscapes and portraits. In 1897 he joined The Ten, a group of artists that included Childe Hassam and William Merritt Chase. When Simmons exhibited this canvas at the group’s annual show in 1912, it was praised, but not in a way likely to have brought the artist much satisfaction. “The country lost a good landscape painter,” wrote one critic, summing up the general view, “when Edward Simmons ceased to paint as he did in 1893.”

This marvelous scene of patriotic revelry could be taking place almost anywhere in the northern United States in the centennial year of 1876, but in fact, Frederic Chapman painted it at the pretty little Hudson River town of Piermont. It is some index of the work’s quality that the member of the staff who spotted it at auction in Manhattan’s William Doyle Gallery watched it soar past its three- to five-thousand-dollar estimate to fetch fifty thousand.

The artist who painted this canvas in 1860 made sure that none of its import would be lost to history. Written along the lower margin are not only the cow’s prodigious measurements— “Forequarter 727½.… Height 6 feet, length from Ear to Boot of tail 10 feet 10 inches…”— and her present whereabouts— “At the Franklin Market, Philadelphia”—but also the agency of her immortality: “painted correctly before slaughtering by the celebrated artist Alexander Boudrou.” Although Boudrou’s renown, if it indeed existed at all, was strictly local, his strenuous self-confidence was not entirely misplaced. The only two other paintings known to be by his hand both now reside in the celebrated Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Collection in Williamsburg, Virginia.

It has been seven years since we began publishing an annual portfolio of our discoveries of little-known paintings that had impressed us both as art and as historical documents. The gallery offered here has been assembled from a variety of sources. Sanford Smith’s always impressive Fall Antiques Show in New York, for instance, yielded up the wonderful scene below of two men staring in evident stupefaction at their heroic cow, and the father of a soldier serving in the Persian Gulf sent us a fine Peale portrait of his ancestor William Eaton, who also saw action in the Middle East. Others of these paintings were briefly visible recently at auction houses before passing into private hands. Each of them, we believe, has something valuable to say about what Americans felt, did, and saw in the light of other days.

In 1987, a sweeping revision of the social studies program in New York State public schools gave the curriculum a strong multicultural slant. It was not strong enough, however, for a task force on minorities appointed by Thomas Sobol, the state education commissioner, in 1989. This task force rendered a report that included an immediately notorious assertion: “Afro-Americans, Asian-Americans, Puerto Ricans/Latinos and Native Americans have all been the victims of an intellectual and educational oppression that has characterized the culture and institutions of the United States and the European American world for centuries.” This “Eurocentric” approach had allegedly instilled an ugly arrogance in students of European descent.