Oranges brought from California and Florida by refrigerated railroad car were just beginning to be available in quantity in the Northern cities when William J. McCloskey appropriated the fruit as his subject (right). All his known works after 1891, when this canvas was painted, show oranges, lemons, or a combination of the two, still wrapped in the meticulously rendered tissue paper that was McCloskey’s unlikely hallmark.
The city of Brooklyn had already surrendered its autonomy to become a borough of Greater New York when Paul Cornoyer painted this muted downtown scene (right) in the early 1900s, but its citizens still tended to see it as an independent entity—as, indeed, they do today. With the opening of the bridge in the 1880s, the population had grown to seven hundred thousand, and despite its raucous neighbor across the river, Brooklyn was a very substantial town in its own right, as Cornoyer’s painting suggests. The artist was born in Missouri in 1864, studied in Paris, and there learned to love both impressionism and noble urban spaces. He eventually settled in New York City, and although he could produce a pretty landscape when he wanted to, his reputation rests on his city scenes.
In October 1984, President Ronald Reagan and Senator Walter Mondale came together on the same platform in Louisville, Kentucky, and again in Kansas City, Missouri. Correspondents tossed questions at them; each answered. Then, instant analysts got busy determining a winner and speculating about what effect, if any, the confrontations would have on the November election. And everybody referred to the meetings as “debates.” They weren’t debates.
Barbara Walters and three or four carefully screened correspondents lobbing questions around do not constitute a debate. They were more like news conferences, with pool reporters doing the questioning. Those free-for-alls during the Democratic primaries were not debates either. John Chancellor, Ted Koppel, and Phil Donahue, with a bunch of guys sitting around yelling “Baloney!” and “Where’s the beef?” certainly wasn’t a debate.
At the turn of the century, Charles Eliot Norton, professor of art history at Harvard and very much a man of the world, was discussing the works of his colleague, the historian John Fiske. Norton said that Fiske “began with the history of the Universe; went on to the history of the United States; and may yet advance to the history of Cambridge.”
On the first day of June 1843, Bronson Alcott drove a large wagon up to his house in Concord, Massachusetts. Onto it, he loaded his wife, Abby, three of his four little girls, his books, and enough belongings to sustain them in a new home. Ahead of the wagon walked a sour-faced Englishman, Charles Lane, and the oldest Alcott girl, May. Lane’s son, William, aged ten, found a place on the wagon, where he was entrusted with a bust of Socrates.
Through spells of sun and showers the little party made its way fourteen miles west to the town of Harvard. Their destination was a red farmhouse set upon ninety acres of rolling meadow and woodland, a property that Lane had paid for since Alcott, as always, had no money. There were only ten old apple trees in sight, but as Louisa May Alcott, the second daughter, later wrote, “in the firm belief that plenteous orchards were soon to be evoked from their inner consciousness, these sanguine founders had christened their domain Truitlands.’ ”
I feel that my life has been mostly uneventful. But, to other people, it seems that I should have nothing more to wish for: my husband and I both work at Lanzhou University in north central China, where my husband is a professor of Russian history and I teach the history of the world’s Middle Ages, as well as ancient Chinese history. At the university, we are considered to have a good future. Besides this, I have two adorable children. It seemed that I should be content because life had blessed me with so much. The only thing I needed to do was to preserve the normal flow of this long river of life. But, as I was born with a nature that is never willing to maintain the status quo, I inevitably created some ripples in the calm stream.
Gathering pictures for this magazine over the years, we have learned that we can’t simply wait for an article to be scheduled and then try to find the ideal scenesetter or the work that perfectly sums up all that has gone before. So throughout the year, we review art magazines, attend gallery openings, and send away for exhibition catalogs from museums around the country, keeping an eye out for those images that might someday open or end a story, or even make a cover.
The paintings offered here are ones that captured our interest during the past year but which we couldn’t quite work into the magazine. So, following the annual custom of many art galleries, we decided to present them all at once in a mid-winter show. Each one evokes its time or place or subject so forcefully that it can provide historical evidence in much the same way as a shard of pottery. An advertisement in the background, a detail of dress or gesture, a style of interior decoration—any of these can offer historical insight and call up a flood of associations.
In the early 1770s, it still seemed likely that the struggle between Britain and her American colonies would be peacefully resolved. If it had been, history would have recorded far more clearly a remarkable development that was temporarily cut off by the AmericanRevolution. This development was a flood of immigration to British mainland North America and a sudden and immense spread of settlement in the backcountry of the coastal colonies and in the trans-Appalachian West. Both the immigration and the spread of settlement had been in motion before the last of the Anglo-French wars in America, the French and Indian War of 1754-63; but the magnitude was so much greater after the war than it had been before, the scale and range of migration and settlement so greatly enlarged, that the essential character of the peopling process seems to have been transformed, and with it some basic elements in American life.
Few enterprises for any alleged expert in a given field can be more hazardous than the compilation of a “best” or “worst” list. The undertaking of such an effort immediately invites second-guessing by everyone else with similar credentials and offers the risk that any number of them may give valid, even insurmountable, proof that their selections are superior. Just as historians are forever rating Presidents and are therefore endlessly scrapping over whether Martin Van Buren ranks above or below Rutherford Hayes, so those who care about automobiles automatically dispute one another’s favorites. At least in the realm of politics or military history, ranking is more easily established through tangible successes. But with automobiles, as with art, certain aesthetic judgments must be made, and accomplishments in terms of commerce or public acclaim often have no bearing. Vincent van Gogh died with his work castigated as lunatic scribblings. In 1935 the Stutz Motor Car Company of Indianapolis, Indiana, was building some of the finest luxury automobiles to be found in the world yet was able to sell only six in a Depression-ravaged economy.