William Guy Wall, View Near Fort Montgomery, from Hudson River Portfolio (1821-1825)

British-born Thomas Cole is often hailed as the “Father of the Hudson River School,” the groundbreaking painters who first turned a romantic eye to the mountains and rivers of New York, New England and beyond. His “debut moment” is dated to 1825 when he sold three landscape paintings and took his first, short sketching trip up the Hudson River. Five years earlier, however, William Guy Wall (1792-after 1864) was among the many Irish who sailed for American shores. Upon arrival he followed the entire course of the Hudson River for over 200 miles from Lake Luzerne in the foothills of the Adirondacks to New York Harbor, traveling in the company of British-born poet and journalist John Agg. Immediately upon his return he set about publishing his images in the magisterial compendium Hudson River Portfolio, which appeared in five parts between 1821 and 1825 with descriptive text by Agg. The Portfolio dazzled viewers with the quality of prints, hand coloring and impressive size (14 ½ x 21 ½ inches). Given New York’s close-knit art circle at the time and the fact that prints exist in multiples and readily circulate, it is virtually impossible that Cole was unaware of his predecessor’s remarkable renderings.

Charles C. Ingham, The Great Adirondack Pass, Painted on the Spot, 1837, Adirondack Experience.

Born and trained in Dublin, Charles Cromwell Ingham (1796 or 1797-1863) arrived in New York two years prior to Wall and soon became known as the city’s premier “ladies’ painter” for the portraits and genre scenes he rendered in meticulous detail. Occasionally he escaped his studio and the demands of capturing flattering likenesses to work outdoors. In 1837 he accompanied Ebenezer Emmons on the New York State Survey and sketched key sites across the region that subsequently appeared in New York State Assembly Document, number 200 (Albany 1838). His maps and landscapes constitute the earliest published views of the Adirondack Peaks, then a remote and little-known region. Although commissioned to accompany the report, a few sets of the lithographed pictures were issued separately. He also painted in oil on canvas a work entitled The Great Adirondack Pass, Painted on the Spot, 1837. His compelling images prompted others to seek out the sites he identified – including the challenging Indian Pass – that have since become the iconic places for artists and hikers.

Paul Kane, Assiniboine Hunting Buffalo, 1851-56, National Gallery of Canada

Emigrating from Mallow, County Cork, Ireland, Paul Kane (1810-1871) at the age of nine arrived in Toronto, Canada (then named “York”). Inspired by the example of Indian painter George Catlin, he resolved “to devote whatever talents and proficiency I possessed to the paintings of a series of pictures illustrative of North American Indians and scenery,” as he declared in the preface to his book Wanderings of an artist among the Indians of North America (1859). Crossing the border into the United States he spent two years – between 1846 and 1848 – creating one of the most extensive records of the Northwest.

Eliza Greatorex, Landscape near Cragsmoor, 1865, Rockwell Museum

Eliza Pratt Greatorex (1819-1897) departed Ireland as a young woman of about twenty, bound for New York, where she pursued an artistic career. The few professional women artists at the time confined themselves to pictures of babies and domestic scenes, but Greatorex unusually was committed to landscape. Her style combined Hudson River subjects with a French-inspired Barbizon style that was in vogue in the post-Civil War years. In recognition of her contribution to American art, she was elected an Associate of the prestigious National Academy of Design in 1869, the sole female member.  The subject of my recent book Restless Enterprise: The Art and Life of Eliza Pratt Greatorex (U. of California Press, 2020), she had a long and productive career evolving from painter to pioneer of the etching revival. She nurtured the next generation of women artists including her daughters Kathleen and Elizabeth Greatorex.

About 1872 a lithograph entitled St. Patrick’s Day in America depicted a family of Irish descent in their American parlor surrounded by objects signifying the dual identity. On this same day 150 years later, it is appropriate to acknowledge the foundational contributions of Irish-born Wall, Ingham, Kane and Greatorex to the forging of an American landscape art.

John Reid, pinxt, Duval & Hunter, Litho, St. Patrick’s Day in America, ca. 1872, lithograph, Library of Congress

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Wayne Thiebaud, Pies, Pies, Pies, 1966

Pi Day is an annual celebration of the mathematical constant π (pi), observed on March 14, since 3, 1 and 4 are the first three significant numbers of π. Established in 1988, this event involves holding pi recitation competitions or – better still – eating pie. Here I am proposing an alternative way to honor the occasion: exploring pie making in the early America before electric ovens and ready-made crusts came along. Glimpses into kitchens, recipes and profiles of pioneering celebrity chiefs set the stage for our own culinary experiments with centuries’ old recipes.

Our story starts with the nation’s first consummate host and hostess: George and Martha Custis Washington. Almost every aspect of their lives was commemorated in text and image, and their kitchen was no exception. In 1857 figure painter Eastman Johnson and landscapist Louis Mignot visited their Virginia plantation Mount Vernon to make sketches for future paintings. One product of the trip was Johnson’s Washington’s Kitchen, Mount Vernon (1864) featuring an African American woman and children seated by the hearth where thick crusted pies were laboriously prepared.

Martha Washington’s cookbook that survives in the collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania provides more personal insight. Such precious volumes were written for a daughter so that she could take the family recipes with her when she married and had her own home and kitchen. Martha’s mother-in-law Mrs. Custis gave it to her and she kept it handy for fifty years before bequeathing it to her granddaughter Nelly Parke Custis. The five hundred recipes have fortunately been transcribed from the original handwritten manuscript by Karen Hess in Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery and Booke of Sweetmeats (NY: Columbia University Press, 1996).

Martha Washington’s Cookbook, Historical Society Pennsylvania

By-passing desserts like mince pie, I was intrigued by the instructions for a pie made with “lettis,” referring to various leafy green vegetables including spinach, chard, and cabbage. The recipe reads:

“When you have raised ye crust, lay in all over the bottom some butter, & strow in some sugar, cinnamon, & a little boyle yr. cabbage lettis in a little water & salt, & when ye water is drayned from it, lay it in yr coffin with some dammask pruens stoned; then lay on ye top some marrow & such seasoning as you layd on ye bottom. Yn close it up and bake it.”

The combination of cabbage and prunes – strange to our taste – reflects the diverse ethnic origins of cookery in colonial America.

The ability of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson to set the standards for culinary excellence in the fledgling nation was due to the skills of enslaved chefs of African descent. Dishes that were celebrated at Washington’s presidential dinner parties were prepared by Hercules Posey, whose culinary skills were legendary but who was nonetheless an enslaved worker with few records to document his achievement as “America’s first celebrity chef.” Conducting research for her novel The General’s Cook, Ramin Ganeshram uncovered the testimony of Washington’s step grandson George Washington Parke Custis, who remembered him as “a culinary artiste” and “dandy” whose “underlings flew to his command” (including paid white servants). In 1797 he walked away to freedom in New York, where he worked as a cook and caterer until his death in 1812. While none of Posey’s recipes survive, period accounts detail his fabulous meals that included fruit pies. Happy Pi Day!

Artful Birthday Blog: March 11

Dorothy Gish: Pioneer of the Silent Screen

When moving pictures were born in the late 1890s simple acts — a family eating a meal, a man sneezing, two actors kissing, or workers exiting a factory — titillated audiences, who were mesmerized by the camera’s ability to capture motion on film. As the novelty wore off movie makers began to search for strategies to convey more complex stories, from wartime reenactments such as Shooting Captured Insurgents, Spanish-American War (1898) to fairytales like Jack and the Beanstalk (1902). Logic dictated that actors from vaudeville, Broadway or theatrical touring companies were the obvious choice to perform in front of the camera. Acting on film sets and locations, however, turned out to be quite different from being on the stage, and not everyone made the cut.

Dorothy Gish (1898-1968) was among the pioneers who transitioned successfully from stage to screen, first playing bit parts and then working her way up to bigger roles and eventually to five-reel productions including Old Heidelberg (1915) and Jordan is a Hard Road (1915). To celebrate her birthday on March 11, we look at her place in those remarkable early decades of silent cinema (from which, sadly, only a small portion of the large film output survives).

The silent era (1896-1927) featured a surprising number of sister duos. The Talmadge sisters were often type cast according to genre: Norma was considered better suited to drama while Constance was the comedian. In truth, Norma could be just as funny as her sibling, and occasionally got the chance to prove it. Jane and Katherine Lee often appeared together, starring in Fox’s “kiddie films” like The Little Imps (1917). There was Helene Costello and her sibling Dolores Costello, who married John Barrymore; twin sisters Madeline and Marion Fairbanks; and the list continues. Dorothy Gish and her older sister Lillian Gish are by far the best known. They collaborated most famously in Orphans of the Storm (1921) about two sisters in revolutionary Paris.

But for her birthday we want to put the spotlight on the seriously underrated Dorothy and two surviving movies that she made solo. She had a rare starring role at age eighteen in Gretchen the Greenhorn (1916), as a Dutch immigrant bound for New York, where she and her father (a master engraver) are trapped in a counterfeiting scheme from which she must free them. At a time when exaggeration and ham acting were the norm, Gish conveys a range of emotions with subtlety. Aside from her performance, what is remarkable about this film is its recovery story. Assumed lost, the movie was uncovered in an old barn Washington state. Silent film history is filled with stories like this one, so be on the lookout!

Ten years later Dorothy starred in the title role of Nell Gwyn (1926) that follows the life of the mistress of King Charles II. “This is the first English production to reach these shores that will meet with the approval of American audiences. Perhaps this is due to the appearance of our Dorothy Gish in the cast,” Photoplay reported in April 1926. “Never has Dorothy done such creditable work, and, as the little impish gamin who becomes a favorite of the King.” Playing the paramour in dresses cut a bit lower than usual, she prompted a warning in Harrison’s Reports (July 31, 1926): “The story is, of course, suggestive… It might not be the right picture for a Sunday entertainment in religious communities.” By 1927 Al Jolson would appear in The Jazz Singer, marking the beginning of talking pictures, when movies changed radically, and many careers abruptly ended. Happily, the Gish sisters continued to thrive. But that is a story for another blog.

1848 brought radical shifts in the New York art world. With “Father of the Hudson River School” Thomas Cole’s untimely death in February, his brilliant young pupil Frederic Church began forging a global landscape art. William Sidney Mount was showing his familiar Long Island scenes when newcomers George Caleb Bingham and Charles Deas introduced novel pictures of life in the American West. Even more extraordinary, that year Lilly Martin Spencer (1822-1902) exhibited her first work at the city’s National Academy of Design and soon became the country’s most popular female genre painter (Ohio Historical Society).

She rejected the usual “female fare:” miniatures on ivory such as those by specialist Ann Hall (New-York Historical Society), or bouquets of flowers or sentimental likenesses of children. Instead, she shattered convention with domestic subjects carrying social commentary touched with humor. It was no coincidence that her debut overlapped with the Seneca Falls Convention marking the birth of the US Women’s Rights Movement.

The artist insisted to her progressive mother that she had little time for political causes. Born Angélique Marie Martin, she emigrated with her family from Great Britain to Ohio, where she studied art in Cincinnati and painted a self-portrait (ca. 1840, Ohio History Connection). She married Englishman Benjamin Rush Spencer in 1844 and gave birth to 13 children, 7 of whom survived to adulthood. Since she became their principal breadwinner while her husband managed her career and their growing household, she clearly had little time for social activism. Yet her pictures portrayed upstanding and independent-minded females that reinforced the message of the women’s movement. Her Conversation Piece (ca. 1851; Metropolitan Museum) skillfully depicts a family group in their middle-class parlor.

As usual, she serves as the model for the mother who lovingly cradles her young child while her husband modeled for the male figure who stands protectively over them. Decorative objects including lamps, compotes, table coverings and carpets assure us that this housewife runs an orderly home in which to educate their child.

Gender relations were not always so trouble free, as other pictures by Spencer reveal. In Young Husband: First Marketing the artist’s husband appears again in a narrative that reveals fissures beneath the façade of domestic harmony. Shirking one of her duties, the wife has sent her husband out to purchase food for dinner. Ill-equipped for his task, he stumbles along, barely able to keep the food items in his basket, while a passer-by jeers at him. The streetscape is rendered in precise detail, with billboards posted on the fence behind the figures and cobblestones slick with rain. In the “sequel” to this scene Spencer painted Young Wife: First Stew (1854; Metropolitan Museum) where she – the inexperienced cook – must prepare dinner from the items he managed to bring home. Addressing the dilemma of newly-weds struggling to run their household efficiently, Spencer not only pokes gentle fun at the young woman’s ineptitude but also introduces the novel solution of the husband undertaking the shopping – what was considered “women’s work” – even if it means ridicule from other men.

Painted fifteen years later, We Both Must Fade (1869; Smithsonian American Art Museum) provides a complex penetration into the psyche of a now middle-aged woman.  A large canvas with the single figure shown life-sized, standing before a mirror, dressed in a shimmering blue satin gown accented with lace, her jewelry box and a blossom-filled vase sitting on the table just behind her. In her hand she holds a rose from which petals fall, the lamps behind her have been extinguished, and she bows her head in a pensive gesture. Accustomed to read symbolism into flowers and decorative objects, viewers understood that like the wilting flowers, her beauty too will soon fade and with it, her social standing and principal source of feminine power. In this commissioned portrait of Mrs. Fithian, the artist has formulated an allegory that addresses the fear of aging in a society that favors youth and that puts so much emphasis – then as now – on surface appearances. Spencer like her contemporary Frederic Church continued to paint until shortly before her death but it was in these key decades of the 1850s and the 1860s that they had their fingers on the pulse of the country. In that era Spencer produced works that addressed domesticity and gender relations with originality and humor. Happy Birthday Lilly Martin Spencer, whose birth 200 years ago we celebrate today!

Eulabee Dix:Miniaturist and Muse By Katherine Manthorne

Do you have a portrait miniature in your family, or have you peeked at a specimen or two in the darkened chambers of museums or historical societies? Intimate keepsakes given by the sitter to a loved one to convey affection, they are often regarded today as relics of a bygone era, tiny likenesses of long-deceased ancestors limned by artists in the 18th or early 19th centuries. Like most trends in the art world, however, miniature painting was revived and reinvigorated. Around 1900 pioneers like the fascinating, enigmatic and multi-talented Eulabee Dix (1878-1961) led the charge with works such as the handsome self-portrait she entitled Me (ca. 1899).

Praised as one of the “well-known names” among modern miniaturists, she excelled at this exacting mode of painting in watercolor with fine brushes on small bits of ivory. Famous figures of the day flocked to her studio in the Carnegie Hall Towers including Ethel Barrymore, Ellen Terry and Mark Twain. In an uncommon instance of one female artist depicting another, Dix painted photographer Gertrude Käsebier. She in turn reciprocated with a gelatin silver print of Dix that presents her as an elegant society lady rather than a female artist of limited financial means who tried to support herself with her craft. The tactility of the fur muff and velvet coat convey success while her direct gaze spells confidence. In early twentieth century New York — abuzz with new trends in literature and the visual artists – it was not easy to gain a foot hold, but Dix made contacts that allowed her to negotiate between the worlds of bohemia and the establishment.

Beginning in 1906 Dix made several trips to Europe, where she immersed herself in a broad cross section of art, from Elizabethan miniatures to grand manner European portraiture. In England she formed close friendship with Mrs. Charles Duff (Flora) Baker, whom she sensitively portrayed in three-quarter length on the 5 x 4 in. confines of the ivory oval. In London she held her first exhibition at the Fine Arts Society that showcased 24 miniatures, and simultaneously displayed others at the Royal Academy of Arts and Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery. With a growing record of prestigious exhibits and the patrons she was courting through her new connections, her career was taking off.

In August 1910 the Ashcan artist John Sloan decided to record the convivial assemblage gathered for dinner in the backyard at Petitpas, a French restaurant and boarding house in the Chelsea district of Manhattan. Eulabee Dix is among this lively party that includes (starting at the upper left and going around the table) poet Alan Seeger, writer John Butler Yeats, literary critic Van Wyck Brooks, Sloan’s wife Dolly, Scottish fiction writer Robert Sneddon, Dix, editor Frederick King and Vera Jelihovsky Johnson, wife of Irish scholar Charles Johnson. Sloan himself sits apart from the others while Celestine Petitpas stands behind Sneddon and serves fruit. A long-time resident at his boarding house (1910 until his death in 1922), Yeats is shown here sketching a likeness of one of the guests: likely Vera Johnson, who seems to be posing opposite him at the near side of the table. On other occasions he drew portraits of Eulabee Dix (one owned by Sloan) and was her frequent correspondent and confidant. Convinced that making portraits was a vital tool for all artists, Yeats made a regular practice of drawing his companions as well as his own self-portraits. His words and example bolstered not only Sloan’s practice but also that of Dix.

After a decade of living as an independent female artist, Dix married New York lawyer Alfred Leroy Becker in December 1910. While Sloan’s mentor and fellow Ashcan artist Robert Henri painted her in her wedding dress, John Butler Yeats wrote to his daughter Lily: “I once told her [Dix] I would not envy the man that she married, for she would be sure to devour him. She has a clinging way like ivy, which we know always kills the tree to which it attaches itself.” Two children and fifteen years later the Irish writer proved correct when the marriage ended in divorce. She continued to paint miniatures at home and abroad, but the stock market crash in 1929 signaled a marked shift in her trajectory.

Yeats’ comparison between this miniaturist and ivy has resonance in other aspects of her art and life, for the plant also symbolizes endurance and tenacity. Her commitment to miniature painting never waned and even when it fell completely out of favor as a commodity, she delivered lectures on the art and history of the medium. On a personal level she continued to seek new opportunities and experiences and took the bold step in 1956 – at the age of 78 – of selling her possessions and moving to Lisbon, Portugal, where a retrospective of her career was mounted at the Museu Nacional de Arte Antigua. Her legacy lives on through her exquisite paintings “in small” (as she called them) found in numerous museums and through her archives now held by the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Collectively they tell a chapter in the history of an art form that survived, in part thanks to Dix, from medieval manuscript illumination to modern times.

Happy Birthday, Eulabee Dix!

Katherine Manthorne, “John Sloan, Moving Pictures and Celtic Spirits,” in Heather Coyle and Joyce Schiller, Seeing the City: John Sloan’s New York (Delaware Art Museum w/Yale University Press, 2007): 152.

The most complete source is Jo Ann Ridley, Looking for Eulabee Dix: The Illustrated Biography of an American Miniaturist (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1998.

Public outcry broke out when the statue of the recently assassinated Abraham Lincoln was unveiled in the United States Capitol Rotunda by its creator: the first female and youngest person awarded a government commission at the age of 19. (A century later an unknown 21-year-old architecture student named Maya Lin strirred controversy over her design for the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial.)

Vinnie Ream, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain and a Stand-off in the U.S. Capitol

It was a cold night in January 1871 when Lavinia Ellen “Vinnie” Ream (later Hoxie, 1847-1914) dropped the curtain to reveal her full-length marble statute of the 16^th president she had sketched from life not long before that fateful night at Ford’s Theater. A portrait of Ream completed by G.P. A. Healy around the same time highlights her luxurious tresses and independent spirit that caught the eye of many a Washington mover and shaker, including Union General Tecumseh Sherman, Confederate General Albert Pike and a string of congressmen and senators.[i] Her rise to prominence in turn caught the attention of the aspiring writer Mark Twain, who in 1868 penned a tongue-in-cheek account of her “occupation” of a studio where she fashioned her clay and plaster models under the Capitol dome: 

“How Miss Vinnie Ream Got into the Capitol, and Won’t be Turned Out”

This is the shrewdest politician of them all.  With a mild talent for sculpture, but with hardly as much claim on the patronage of the Government as even the poorest of the artists that have canvassed and frescoed our beautiful capitol with their curious nightmares at a liberal so-much an acre (they painted by the acre, likely), she has procured from Congress an interminable contract to build a bronze statue of President Lincoln for ten thousand dollars.  That is well enough, for she can build statues as well as those other parties can swab frescoes – a remark which cannot by any possibility be tortured into the semblance of a compliment – but that she should succeed in getting hold of and hanging on to a choice chamber in the crowded Capitol, wherein to build Mr. Lincoln, when a tract of ground, four or five times as large as England, together with its tax-paying population of two hundred thousand souls, is trying to get into that Capital, are perfectly aware that they ought to be allowed to enter there and yet cannot succeed, is a very, very, very, very interesting mystery to the subscriber.  Really, does it not look a little singular that nine accredited delegates of nine great Territories should be obliged to stand out in the cold, month after month, in order that pretty, and talkative, and winning little Miss Vinnie Ream may have a sumptuously furnished chamber in the Capitol to build her Mr. Lincoln in?  I ask this in no spirit of vindictiveness, for I surely bear Miss Vinnie Ream no malice. I just simply ask it as a man and a brother.

His remarks capture something of the intrigues of the Reconstruction-era:

I said she was the shrewdest politician of them all – and verily she is.  The Government never gave her permission to bring her mud, her naked, scandalous plaster models, and set up her little shop in the Temple of Liberty and go to building Mr. Lincoln there.  No, she just talked pretty, girlish talk to some of those impotent, iron-clad old politicians – Congressmen, of course – and got out her mud and made busts of some of the others; and she kept on in this fashion until she over-mastered them all with her charming little ways, and they told her to go, take a room in the Capitol, build Mr. Lincoln, and be happy…

The various strategies she deployed to outsmart her opponents slowly won over Mark Twain:

But here lately those nine delegates from the Territories have talked so plainly of the discourtesy that is being shown them in having allowed no resting-place in the Capitol, that at last the Congressmen have felt obliged to look around and see what could be done in their behalf.  What could they do? Manifestly, since every solitary room in the building was already occupied in a legitimate manner, except for one occupied by Miss Ream, there was nothing left to do but go after that.  They little knew their antagonist. They went – and found on the door this notice, just pasted up: “Miss Ream is absent from the city – for two weeks!” by which time the storm will have blown over, the Congressmen will have forgotten it, and the nine delegates become reconciled to the open air, and hopeless of ever getting that storm awakened again.  It would take but little to turn my sympathies in favor of the Artful Dodger….

— Mark Twain[ii]

Undeterred by savage criticism she persevered and fashioned a succession of likenesses of well-known men, culminating in her bronze statue of Civil War Admiral David Glasgow Farragut installed in 1881 in Washington’s Farragut Square. Civic monuments in her day seldom portrayed women but Ream created a rare female figures with her Sappho (c. 1870, Smithsonian American Art Museum), the 6^th century B.C. Greek poet who was condemned as licentious for dedicating her verses to her female disciples on Lesbos. After a career negotiating the homosocial world of government, Ream tellingly designated a version of Sappho to preside over her grave at Arlington National Cemetery: a fitting celebration of female creativity.

Happy Birthday, Vinnie Ream!

[i] Glenn V Sherwood,Labor of Love: The Life & Art of Vinnie Ream (Hygiene, CO : SunShine Press Publications, 1997) and Edward S. Cooper, Vinnie Ream: An American Sculptor (Chicago, Ill. : Academy Chicago Publishers, 2004) are the standard sources.

[ii]The Chicago Republic February 19, 1868.