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January 2011
American still-life painters of the nineteenth century were enormously fond of cigar boxes, folded newspapers, and half-finished glasses of wine. In 1878 John F. Peto, one of the masters of the genre, turned his attention to a more idiosyncratic pleasure: peppermint candy spilling from a bag.
During the 1940s, when Peter Hurd painted La Guardia Airport at Dusk , air travel was still such a novelty that runways seemed to lead straight into the heavens, and a walk on the observation deck of the Central Terminal Building was prime evening entertainment. Hurd, who served as an artist-correspondent tor Life during World War II, spent most of his life in New Mexico. Here, he finds at La Guardia all the drama of a Western landscape.
Bargain Hunters is the work of Kenneth Hayes Miller, an artist born in the Utopian Oneida Community in 1876 who moved to New York City at the turn of the century. Once there, he was stunned at the crowds—he liked to spend time at the Hudson Ferry Terminal marveling at the numbers of commuters pouring in from New Jersey. Miller kept a studio on busy Fourteenth Street, and women shoppers on the street and in department stores were a favorite subject.
Daniel Webster maintains what frail hold he still has on the popular imagination through Stephen Vincent Benèt’s superb short story that locks him in oratorical combat with the Devil. Butin his day he was a true folk hero, his fierce dark eyes, barrel chest, and rock of a jaw backed up by a rhetorical brilliance unmatched by anyone else alive. This Webster is very evident in the fine likeness opposite, by Francis Alexander, who was Boston’s most popular portraitist when Webster sat for him in 1835. Later “Black Dan” would infuriate much of his New England constituency by backing the fugitive-slave law; but Alexander’s powerful portrait shows one of the most popular men in America.
On March 8,1862, on her first test run off Hampton Roads, the Confederate ironclad Merrimac took on the Union frigate Cumberland and sank her to the bottom. In the study opposite, painted during the 1880s by Edward Moran, the artist concentrates on the striking vessel proudly flying the Stars and Stripes. Later in his career, when Moran was working on a series of paintings depicting the maritime history of the United States, he again chose this incident signaling the triumph of iron construction over wood rather than the better-known confrontation between the Merrimac and the Monitor that occurred the following day.
Dawn Before Gettysburg (above) is the work of a twentieth-century artist not often associated with historical scenes—Edward Hopper. But all his life, Hopper was fascinated by military history, especially Mathew Brady’s photographs of the CivilWar.lt seems entirely appropriate that in 1934 the creator of Nighthawks and Automat should paint not the battle itself, but the apprehensive wait for it to begin.
The arresting portrait at left is by an artist with impressive ancestry—Ellen Day Hale, descendant of Nathan Hale, daughter of Edward Everett Hale, and great-niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Born in Boston in 1855, Ellen Hale studied art there and in Paris, becoming known for her vivid colors and powerful execution. After 1904 she moved to Washington, D.C., where she sketched President Theodore Roosevelt. This confident young woman holding an ostrich fan is the artist herself, at age thirty.
In 1892, when the statesman John Hay was building his house in Washington, D.C., he commissioned a pair of stained-glass windows from the artist John La Farge. Although he was quickly overshadowed by Tiffany, La Farge was America’s greatest innovator in the medium: the first to use opalescent glass and the first to translate flat Japanese design into windows. For the Hay House, La Farge created a peacock window and one of windblown peonies. His watercolor sketch for the peonies shown here is even lovelier than the final version.