Beauty & Bounty: American Art in an Age of Exploration

A new exhibit called Beauty & Bounty: American Art in an Age of Exploration just opened at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) featuring American landscape painters in the 19th century.  What better way to start off the long holiday weekend celebrating Independence Day than by going to see this exhibit on Friday night?  Unfortunately my friends and I got off to a late start and we didn't have as long as we would like in the museum before they closed, however in that short time I did see a lot and also found out some of the reasons for painting landscapes at that time.  I also learned of some new favorite painters such as William Keith, Grafton Tyler Brown and pioneer daughter Emily Inez Denny whose view of the San Juans was among my favorite paintings.

Mount Rainier Bay of Tacoma, Sanford Robinson Gifford, 1875, Seattle Art Museum

I went from room to room gasping in awe as I saw each painting and wishing I had more time to spend in front of them.  While the artists in this exhibit weren’t working in one specific style there were definitely commonalities in the work.  American landscape painting from this time period can best be described as majestic.  It is bittersweet to look at the paintings knowing some of these landscapes aren’t there anymore but for those that remain these paintings would inspire anyone to want to visit all the places depicted.

SAM’s website states this about the exhibit:

“When the first surveyors went westward, they took painters and photographers with them to create images that would fire the collective imagination of a nation and draw emigrants westward.

Albert Bierstadt's painting of Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast for example, was deemed a virtuous enterprise for attempting to transport viewers to a still unknown region of the country. We tend to think of landscape art as a record of an artist's personal, intimate experience in nature, but in the nineteenth century, artists painted the American landscape as a response to the enthusiasms of their audience, too. They led us to remote places of natural splendor and abundance, and we followed, leaving our own marks upon the land.”

Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast, Albert Bierstadt, 1870, Seattle Art Museum

I have always loved the German born painter Albert Bierstadt and his panoramic and sweeping views of landscapes.  This work at SAM has always fascinated me; I now know Bierstadt painted this without seeing the Puget Sound which is why it is so unusual.  The landscape is dramatic, but it doesn’t actually exist.  Bierstadt based it off a combination of the Atlantic coast and mountainous areas he had seen.

However the rest of the paintings give an accurate view of American vistas from coast to coast.  There were examples of the rocky shores of Maine, Niagra Falls, several mountain ranges (Catskills, Adirondacks, and Rockies), the Grand Canyon, the Yosemite Valley and the Pacific Northwest among others.

There was also a sizable collection of landscape photography and if I hadn’t been ushered out by the museum guards (yes we were the last to leave the building) I would have seen that too, but I’ll be back.  This exhibit runs from June 30 to September 11, 2011 and has an accompanying catalog.  Also, there is a concurrent program running on Public TV station KCTS 9 called Land of Beauty and Bounty.

A Painting by Any Other Name

How much does the title of an artwork affect how we respond to it? It is an interesting question, especially because until the first salon exhibits started under King Louis XIV in 1667 at the French Royal Academy, there wasn’t a tradition of artist’s giving their work a title.  Sometimes a title was given and more often than not works were left untitled. There wasn’t a need as paintings and sculptures were commissioned by patrons who requested a specific theme and no one envisioned either museums or future historians discussing each work. 

Gerard ter Borch, Parental Admonition, 1654-55 (Rijksmuseum)

In fact most famous paintings created before the 18th century were actually named by art historians or museum curators in the 19th century for the purpose of research or cataloguing work.  Even in the 17th century when art was painted for the general art market and galleries, the modern idea of giving all works of art a title wasn’t in place yet.  We will look at three examples, all from Dutch 17th century art, a time when many “genre” paintings or scenes of everyday life were created.

The painting above, ter Borch’s Parental Admonition is a good example of a wrongly titled painting.  It was originally incorrectly interpreted as a set of parents scolding their young daughter who bows her head shamefully.  However upon closer examination it was determined to be a scene at a brothel.  Brothel scenes and allegories of sin were a popular theme in the 17th century Netherlands.  Another example of a painting given an incorrect title can be seen below in ter Borch’s contemporary, Samuel van Hoogstraten The Slippers.  

Samuel van Hoogstraten, The Slippers, 1654-62 (Louvre)

We have on the surface a quiet interior setting without figures with two slippers in the foreground.  On closer examination we have before us another allegory of lust and temptation.  The slippers are not a set, there is one man’s and one woman’s.  A broom in the foreground has been left to the side as if to suggest that the woman who was cleaning (the mistress of the house or maybe a maidservant) and the master of the house have snuck into the bedroom together.  The painting within the painting, the Father Admonishing his Daughter by Netscher was a variation of the above work by Gerard Ter Borch. The contemporary viewer would have taken note of the extinguished candle and immediately understood what was going on.

 

Jan Steen, The Doctor’s Visit, 1658-62, private collection

The last painting we will look at is The Doctor’s Visit by Jan Steen, an artist who did several variations on this theme.  Paintings of young women who were visited by doctors were often titled either “The Doctor’s Visit” or “The Lovesick Woman” but more accurately these are an allegory of sin or lust.  The “lovesickness” in question is usually pregnancy outside of marriage.  Many symbols in these paintings refer to love and lust and again the scene would have been instantly recognizable to the contemporary Dutch viewer.

Titles are something all viewers should carefully consider, who exactly gave a work of art its title?  When it was the artist a whole other level of information is suggested to the viewer and when it was a historian sometimes that level of information is missing or a new subject is implied.  This is an interesting subject area and one I will come back to.

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