January 2011

We’re so used to seeing nineteenth-century America uttered through stylistic conventions that the Ohio street scene above strikes us with disarming clarity. The Cleveland artist Otto Henry Bacher painted it in 1885, after studying in Europe and mastering the hardedged “glare aesthetic” popular at the time. The radical composition suggests that he was under photography’s space-flattening influence as well. By using these new techniques he avoided the coyness often found in genre paintings and highlighted, instead, the casual wonder of everyday life.

On the evening of February 15, 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine rode peacefully at her mooring in Havana Harbor. Officially, it was there on an innocuous diplomatic mission, but many saw its presence as a demonstration of U.S. sympathy for Cuban rebels in their struggle against Spanish imperialism.

At 9:40 P.M., a small explosion shook the port side of the ship. Immediately afterward, the entire forward section of the vessel breached upward in a concussion that curled both deck steel and twelve-inch armor plating. Minutes later, the Maine was settling in soft mud thirty-five feet below the boiling surface.

When he taught painting on Cape Cod in 1899, Hermann Dudley Murphy urged his students to use poetic abstraction to “awaken an emotion” in their viewers, an approach favored by the period’s symbolist movement. In The Marshes , produced that summer, he demonstrated the power of the technique. By emphasizing design over description, he created a dense, fluid landscape, whose lack of specificity manages to give it an oddly modern cast.

Every morning hundreds of cavalrymen take their horses bathing in the bay. Tampa Bay. It makes a very spirited scene … naked cavalrymen mounted on horse, dashing around in the water.” So wrote the artist-reporter William Glackens in 1898 while covering the war in Cuba for McClure’s magazine, the last commercial assignment he accepted. Here his reporter’s power of observation and classic art training teamed for delightful results. While the arrangement of anatomies comes out of the Renaissance school by way of Degas, Glackens describes the scene with a vigorous, journalistic clarity.

In 1912 the Art Association of Richmond, Indiana, commissioned a renowned Hoosier, William Merritt Chase, to paint a small self-portrait. When the 1913 deadline came and went, the association’s director exerted what moral pressure she could by granting a year’s extension and suggesting various still-life elements for the painting. Contrite, Chase agreed. Two more deadlines passed; the director made two more sets of suggestions. When in 1916 she finally met Chase to collect the dilatory painting, she was astounded by the masterful work. Three times larger than the commissioned size, the portrait not only depicts the artist’s forceful character but also demonstrates the evolution of his technique and even includes the requested still-life items.

The sunny California coastline was a revelation to the Chicagoan Arthur Grove Rider. He painted this Edenic view of Oak Street in Laguna Beach in 1928, two years before moving there permanently. Using brilliant spots of color, he captured the intense warmth of afternoon sun, the exotic clumps of foliage, and the glistening Pacific with such alluring physically it’s a wonder all Chicago didnt follow him westward.

One would think this 1876 representation of the private gallery of the Boston Athenaeum would have to be mural-size to accommodate its subject. But in fact the canvas is only thirteen by twenty-one inches (just a bit larger than reproduced here). Enrico Meneghelli recorded all the artwork that actually appeared on the walls and put each Lilliputian painting in a frame that, at this scale, seems truly jewellike. He completed this tribute months before the salon was dismantled.

On July 24,1853, the Manco , a gunpowder storeship in San Francisco Bay, caught fire suddenly and threatened a blast that might devastate the crowded wharf. Desperate fire fighters soaked the Manco and the neighboring Canonicus with water while a fleet of small boats supported the heavy hoses. Amazingly, they prevented any serious explosions. Though they hadn’t actually been witnesses, the genre painters Charles and Arthur Nahl re-created the scene three years later, basing their colorful docudrama on a delivery boy’s sketch.

During the Depression years a contract-bridge craze swept the country, and Ely Culbertson was its darkly romantic hero. Romanian-bom, he spent his youth in the Caucasus inciting revolutionary movements. When he settled in New York—penniless—in 1921, he earned a living playing cards in Greenwich Village bistros. He developed a radical new method of bidding and with it quickly dominated the growing bridge circuit. Through a shrewd use of publicity, he became an extraordinarily wealthy man. Nikol Schattenstein painted this view of Culbertson and his wife in 1935, capturing the player’s studied composure at the height of his fame.

One critic said the magazine illustrator Dean Cornwell sought “to create images whose impact would be more lasting than their medium.” Clearly he succeeded in this nightclub scene, commissioned by Cosmopolitan in 1920 to accompany the short story “Find the Woman.” Though the fiction has sunk into obscurity, Cornwall’s illustration retains a syncopated originality. He’s portrayed the era’s fleshy sophistication with a modern appreciation of geometry. A chandeliered radiance balances dark pyramids of celebrants, while the painting’s greenish cast suggests the artificiality of both the lighting and the socialites’ intercourse.