The Loeb’s founding collection of nineteenth-century American landscape paintings is a nationally significant resource for understanding the artistic movement colloquially known as the
Hudson River School. What this problematic moniker gets right is the roots of this phenomenon
in the Loeb’s own geographic surroundings, New York’s Hudson Valley. From approximately 1825
to 1875, the young United States saw a surge in the production and consumption of realist repre1
sentations of the natural world. This “landscape boom” was built upon a particular confluence of
ambitious painters and dramatic scenic potential in the region, with ready access to the professional outlets of New York City, including the National Academy of Design and the Tenth Street
Studio Building. A representative selection of key objects from the Loeb’s collection reveals
characteristic practices and preoccupations of dominant figures in this diffuse artistic movement
that has had a lasting impact. These works also offer one of the strongest platforms in American
academic museums on which to raise up unheralded creative stories from this fertile period.
36
At the Loeb
Vassar’s Founding Collection:
Landscape Painting of the Hudson Valley
Among the earliest of the Loeb’s American landscape holdings are two fine examples
by artists with roots in Vassar’s region but who also worked abroad. Hudson native Sanford
Robinson Gifford’s The Roman Campagna (fig. 2.1) tackles a canonical artistic test piece: surviving
sections of the Claudian Aqueduct just southeast of central Rome. The composition mirrors
Fig. 2.1. Sanford Robinson Gifford
(American, 1823–1880), The Roman
Campagna, 1859, oil on canvas,
6 × 10 1/8 in. (15.2 × 25.7 cm), Gift of
Matthew Vassar, 1864.1.34.
the approach to the same subject by Thomas Cole, whom Gifford said inspired him to become a
painter; it also introduces the distinctive, gauzy handling of light that would become the younger
artist’s trademark.2
Frederic Edwin Church was likewise grounded in the Mid-Hudson Valley from his studies
with Cole in the town of Catskill and, moreover, the forty-year creation of his masterwork of
three-dimensional landscape art, Olana, just across the river in Hudson. Yet Church also built a
brand as a global expeditionary artist who ventured where few other Western artists did at the
time, offering privileged insights into subject matter less familiar to many viewers in the United
States. Summer in South America (fig. 2.2) is an intriguing process work that drew on his two trips
to present-day Ecuador and Colombia. This painting on the portable medium of artist’s board
revels in the lush botany of the Magdalena River and shows the development of this subject,
which culminated in major finished canvases.3
MA K I NG & ME A NI NG : T HE FR A NCE S L E HMA N LO E B A RT CE NT E R , VAS SA R CO L L E G E
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Fig. 2.2. Frederic Edwin Church
(American, 1826–1900), Summer in
South America, ca. 1853, oil on board,
11 × 16 ¾ in. (28 × 42.6 cm), Gift of
Matthew Vassar, 1864.1.18.
Fig. 2.3. Charles Herbert Moore
(American, 1840–1930), Down
the Hudson to West Point, 1861, oil
on canvas, 20 1/8 × 30 ¼ in. (51.1 ×
76.8 cm), Gift of Matthew Vassar,
1864.1.59.
Fig. 2.4. Aaron Draper Shattuck
(American, 1832–1928), Chocorua
Lake and Mountain, 1855, oil on
canvas, 9 7/8 × 19 ¾ in. (25.1 × 50.2
cm), Gift of Matthew Vassar,
1864.1.64.
a sweeping view of past (the traditional sloops of Dutch extraction) and present (the railroad
cut at left) through a landscape long known for both its scenic and military associations.4 Moore
would be based in Catskill for much of his career, at one point even renting a studio from a son
of Thomas Cole. Yet over time his relationship with the legacy of Cole became increasingly
fraught. He came to identify with the American Pre-Raphaelite followers of English artist and
critic John Ruskin, who rejected in no uncertain terms the romance of earlier landscape artists
Fig. 2.5. Asher Brown Durand
(American, 1796–1886), Through
the Woods, 1856, oil on canvas,
20 ¼ × 15 ½ in. (51.4 × 39.4 cm),
Gift of Matthew Vassar, 1864.1.25.
and Cole in particular.
Also steeped in associations was Mount Chocorua in New Hampshire,
known for both the drama of its jutting, bare summit and the nineteenthcentury “fakelore” of an invented Chief Chocorua who was said to have met a
tragic end on the peak.5 Cole’s impact is palpable here as well: he was a primary
spreader of this myth, depicting the mountain multiple times, including in his
evocative Solitary Lake in New Hampshire (1830) now in the Olana collection.
Shattuck’s image (fig. 2.4), by contrast, is positively ascetic in its crispness of
color and line; the artist declined to heighten the drama of what was an increasingly accessible and populated landscape of leisure.
An adherence to rigorous simplicity is taken yet farther in two works
in the Loeb’s collection that reject distant views and sublime scenery in favor
of a dive deep into the humbler beauties of ordinary trees and rocks. Asher
B. Durand’s Through the Woods (fig. 2.5) is the work of a quintessential estab-
38
Like Gifford’s aqueduct, the subject of the Hudson Highlands near West Point was a
lishment artist who at the time was president of the National Academy of
much-depicted vista by the time Charles Herbert Moore put his own stamp on the subject.
Design in New York, an organization of which all the artists in this section
Moore’s Down the Hudson to West Point (fig. 2.3) hews to the characteristic realist mode, presenting
were members. In this painting, animated only by a foreground squirrel and
VASSA R’ S FOU ND IN G COLLE CT ION: LAN D SCAP E PA IN TIN G O F TH E H UD SO N VA LLE Y
MA K I NG & ME A NI NG : T HE FR A NCE S L E HMA N LO E B A RT CE NT E R , VAS SA R CO L L E G E
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Fig. 2.8. Jervis McEntee (American,
1828–1891), Passing Storm, 1872,
oil on canvas, 14 7⁄8 × 26 ¼ in. (37.8 ×
66.7 cm), Gift of Robert Wilkinson,
in memory of Edith Wilkinson,
1978.3.3.
woodpecker, Durand glories in oak and beech trees, infusing them with the lofty
grandeur of a cathedral and bespeaking the spiritual worldview that was a common
thread among the artists of this diffuse movement. In a similar vein, Whittredge’s
view in southeastern New York’s Shawangunk Mountains (fig. 2.6) celebrates the
humble hemlock tree, its bark a natural resource crucial to the region’s profitable
and destructive tanning industry. This stalwart survivor fills the frame, all evidence
of the human activities to which it was central excised.
Jasper Francis Cropsey’s Artist Sketching on Greenwood Lake (fig. 2.7) is a particularly important object in the collection as evidence of an artist’s unique investment
in place. Cropsey knew this topography deeply and depicted it in a surprisingly large
number of finished oils. His country house, Aladdin (now destroyed), was close by,
allowing him to capture the changing effects of light and weather, a discipline that is
captured in what seems to be a self-portrait within the composition.
A startling outlier in this company is the brooding mood of Jervis McEntee’s
Passing Storm (fig. 2.8), which can be explained by the sad context behind it. As the
Fig. 2.6. Worthington Whittredge
(American, 1820–1910), Rocks and
Pines, ca. 1863/64, oil on canvas,
26 5/8 × 19 ½ in. (67.6 × 49.5 cm),
Gift of Helen Corbett, class of 1932,
1935.4.
Fig. 2.7. Jasper Francis Cropsey
(American, 1823–1900), Artist
Sketching on Greenwood Lake, 1869,
oil on canvas, 19 3/8 × 32 ½ in.
(49.2 × 82.6 cm), Gift of Georgia
Potter Gosnell, class of 1951, and
Elizabeth Gosnell Miller, class of
1984, 2005.28.
central white dove suggests, this was a mourning picture made in memory of his friend John
Tenth Street and the National Academy, which allowed entrée into to the networks of patronage
Frederick Kensett, another major artistic talent of the period represented in the Loeb’s collec-
that would secure their posthumous reputations. Artists like Robert Seldon Duncanson, Julie
tion.6 McEntee was Frederic Church’s most accomplished pupil and may have learned the practice
Hart Beers, Edward Mitchell Bannister, and Eliza Pratt Greatorex have been excluded from
of memorial landscape painting from his teacher.
Vassar’s walls not for reasons of aesthetic merit but rather due to the leanings of the historical
Missing from this assemblage of canonical talents are all those accomplished women
artists and painters of color who did not have the same level of access to the hallowed halls at
collectors who provided these important legacy holdings on which to build. It is heartening to
see that work is now well underway at the Loeb.
William L. Coleman
Wyeth Foundation Curator and Director of the Wyeth Study Center, Brandywine Museum of Art
NOT E S
1. This phrasing appears in numerous places, including
Kenneth Myers, The Catskills: Painters, Writers, and Tourists
in the Mountains, 1820–1895 (Yonkers, NY: Hudson River
Museum, 1987), 9.
her seventieth reunion; conservation of the binding was
donated by Katherine “Gig” Babson 1969 in honor of her
sister, Susan Babson Young, class of 1961, on her sixtieth
reunion, 2021.22.
2. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, inv. 1948.189. John
I. H. Baur, ed., The Autobiography of Worthington Whittredge
(New York: Arno Press, 1969), 56.
5. See Mary Ellen Lepionka, “Chocorua Redux: Revisionist
History of a Name,” Chocorua Lake Conservancy, 1 March
2019, https://www.chocorualake.org/news
/chocorua-redux-revisionist-history-of-a-name.
3. For example, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, inv. 2018.393.
4. A prime example in the Loeb’s collection is William Guy Wall’s
collection of printed views, The Hudson River Portfolio,
of 1825, Gift of Harry W. Havemeyer in honor of his wife,
Eugénie A. Havemeyer, class of 1951, on the occasion of
40
VASSA R’ S FOU ND IN G COLLE CT ION: LAN D SCAP E PA IN TIN G O F TH E H UD SO N VA LLE Y
6. John Frederick Kensett, Berkeley Rock, Newport, 1856, Gift
of Matthew Vassar, 1864.1.49. This little-known aspect of
Church’s work is the focus of a current research project at
Olana, led by Allegra K. Davis.
MA K I NG & ME A NI NG : T HE FR A NCE S L E HMA N LO E B A RT CE NT E R , VAS SA R CO L L E G E
41
Making &Meaning
T H E F R A N C E S L E H M A N LO E B A RT C E N T E R / VAS SA R C O L L E G E
Edited by Elizabeth Nogrady with Alyx Raz
2
Contents
7
Director’s Foreword
134
T. Barton Thurber
9
Acknowledgments
French Modern Art
Cora Michael
140 Catalogue Entries, 192os
Elizabeth Nogrady and Alyx Raz
11
30
34
Making and Meaning at the
Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center
144 Early American Modernism: The Stieglitz Circle
John P. Murphy
Elizabeth Nogrady
152
Collecting Art at Vassar: A Timeline
Elizabeth Nogrady with Anna Molloy and Emily Lesorogol
168 Building a Modern Art Collection
Mary-Kay Lombino
At the Loeb
174 Catalogue Entries, 1950s–1970s
Catalogue Entries, 1930s–1950s
Catalogue Entry Contributors
36
Vassar’s Founding Collection:
Landscape Painting of the Hudson Valley
William L. Coleman
42
Catalogue Entries, 1300s BCE–1500s CE
66
European Prints from the Felix M. Warburg Collection
Elizabeth Nogrady
72
Catalogue Entries, 1600s–1830s
100
Japanese Prints
John P. Murphy
188 Collecting Folk and Self-Taught Art
Mary-Kay Lombino
194 Catalogue Entries, 1970s–1990s
206 Works on Paper by Inuit Artists
Molly S. McGlennen
212
Catalogue Entries, 1990s–2000s
220 Contemporary Photography
Jessica D. Brier
226 Catalogue Entries, 2010s–Present
106
Catalogue Entries, 1840s–1880s
118
Nineteenth-Century Photography
Jessica D. Brier
238 Catalogue Entry Notes
Catalogue Entries, 1880s–1890s
246 Photo Credits
124
232 Modern and Contemporary Art in the Hudson Valley
John P. Murphy