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 37 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 39 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