The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age, 1867–1893 9781501358333, 9781501358302, 9781501358319

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Illustrations
Series Editor’s Introduction
Acknowledgments
Preface
Foreword
1 Introduction
2 Paris’s Guiding Light: The Universal Exposition of 1867
3 “Paris Is for Sale” and Americans Are Buying
4 Purchasing Ideologies: Seven New York Collections
5 Marketing the Collections: Loans, Periodicals, Books, and Prints
6 From Private Collection to Public Good: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
7 Conclusion: The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age, 1867–1893

Contextualizing Art Markets This series presents new, original research that reconceives the scope and function of art markets throughout history by examining them in the context of broader institutional practices, knowledge networks, social structures, collecting activities, and creative strategies. In many cases, art market activities have been studied in isolation from broader themes within art history, a trend that has tended to stifle exchange across disciplinary boundaries. Contextualizing Art Markets seeks to foster increased dialogue between art historians, artists, curators, economists, gallerists, and other market professionals by contextualizing art markets around the world within wider art historical discourses and institutional practices. The series has been developed in the belief that the reciprocal relation between art and finance is undergoing a period of change: artists are adopting innovative strategies for the commercial promotion of their work, auction houses are expanding their educational programs, art fairs are attracting unprecedented audience numbers, museums are becoming global brands, private galleries are showing increasingly “curated” exhibitions, and collectors are establishing new exhibition spaces. As the divide between public and private practices narrows, questions about the social and ethical impact of market activities on the production, collection, and reception of art have become newly pertinent. By combining trends within the broader discipline of art history with investigations of marketplace dynamics, Contextualizing Art Markets explores the imbrication of art and economics as a driving force behind the aesthetic and social development of the art world. We welcome proposals that debate these issues across a range of historical periods and geographies. Series Editor: Kathryn Brown, Loughborough University, UK Editorial Board: Véronique Chagnon-Burke, Christie’s Education, USA Christel H. Force, Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA Charlotte Galloway, Australian National University, Australia Mel Jordan, Coventry University, UK Alain Quemin, Université Paris-8, France Mark Westgarth, University of Leeds, UK

Published Volumes in the Series: Art Markets, Agents and Collectors: Collecting Strategies in Europe and the United States, 1550–1950, edited by Adriana Turpin and Susan Bracken Collecting Prints, Posters, and Ephemera: Perspectives in a Global World, edited by Ruth E. Iskin and Britany Salsbury Corporate Patronage of Art and Architecture in the United States, Late Nineteenth Century to the Present, edited by Monica E. Jovanovich and Melissa Renn Ellen Emmet Rand: Gender, Art, and Business, edited by Alexis L. Boylan Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa: A Study of Trans-Imperial Cultural Flows, by Zachary Kingdon Old Masters Worldwide: Markets, Movements and Museums, 1789–1939, edited by Susanna Avery-Quash and Barbara Pezzini Pioneers of the Global Art Market: Paris-Based Dealer Networks, 1850–1950, edited by Christel H. Force Reframing Japonisme: Women and the Asian Art Market in Nineteenth-Century France, 1853–1914, by Elizabeth Emery Théodore Rousseau and the Rise of the Modern Art Market: An Avant-Garde Landscape Painter in Nineteenth-Century France, by Simon Kelly Women, Art, and Money in England, 1880–1914: The Hustle and the Scramble, by Maria Quirk

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The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age, 1867–1893 Leanne M. Zalewski

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Leanne M. Zalewski, 2023 Leanne M. Zalewski has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. xvii–xix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Tjaša Krivec Cover image: View of William H. Vanderbilt art gallery at 640 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY. Source: E. Strahan, Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and Collection (Boston, 1883–84), n. p. Courtesy of the Frick Art Reference Library. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-5833-3 ePDF: 978-1-5013-5831-9 eBook: 978-1-5013-5832-6 Series: Contextualizing Art Markets Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

­­This book is dedicated to my nieces and nephews and to Andrea Lepage and Lindsay Twa.

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­Contents List of Illustrations x Series Editor’s Introductionxv Acknowledgmentsxvii Prefacexx Forewordxxi 1 Introduction1 2 Paris’s Guiding Light: The Universal Exposition of 1867 11 3 “Paris Is for Sale” and Americans Are Buying 25 4 Purchasing Ideologies: Seven New York Collections 47 5 Marketing the Collections: Loans, Periodicals, Books, and Prints 90 ­6 From Private Collection to Public Good: The Metropolitan Museum of Art 111 ­7 Conclusion: The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 131 Notes149 Bibliography199 Index 227

Illustrations Note: Collectors’ names referred to in the text are given after each entry, except for bequests by Collis P. Huntington, William T. Walters, and Catharine Lorillard Wolfe. 2.1 Jean-Léon Gérôme, Duel after the Masquerade, 1857, reduction c. 1859, 15 3/8 × 22 3/16 in. (39.1 × 56.3 cm); The Walters Art Museum, art.thewalters.org. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD. Source: commons. wikimedia.org 2.2 Ernest Meissonier, Information: General Desaix with the Army of the Rhine and Moselle, 1867, 11 7/8 × 17 in. (30.2 × 43.2 cm); Dallas Museum of Fine Art, Dallas, TX. Formerly William H. Vanderbilt collection. Source: commons. wikimedia.org 3.1 Rosa Bonheur, Horse Fair, 1852–1855, oil on canvas, 96 1/4 × 199 1/2 in. (244.5 × 506.7 cm), formerly Alexander T. Stewart collection. Gift of Cornelius Vanderbilt, 1887, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org ­3.2 Jean-Léon Gérôme, Death of Caesar, 1859–1867, oil on canvas, 33 11/16 × 57 5/16 in. (85.5 × 145.5 cm), The Walters Art Museum, art.thewalters.org. Source: commons.wikimedia.org 3.3 Jean-Jacques Henner, The Source, 1881, oil on canvas, 35 × 27 in. (88.9 × 68.6 cm), formerly Mary Jane Morgan collection. Source: Image courtesy of Richard Taylor Fine Art 3.4 Jehan-Georges Vibert, The Missionary’s Adventures, c. 1883, Oil on wood, 39 × 53 in. (99.1 × 134.6 cm), formerly Mary Jane Morgan collection, Bequest of Collis P. Huntington, 1900, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org 3.5 Alexander T. Stewart’s Picture Gallery at 1 West 34th Street, c. 1880. Source: George W. Sheldon Artistic Houses (New York: Appleton & Co., 1883–1884), vol. 1, n.p 3.6 Ernest Meissonier, 1807, Friedland, c. 1861–1875, oil on canvas. 53 1/2 × 95 1/2 in. (135.9 × 242.6 cm), formerly Alexander T. Stewart collection. Gift of Henry Hilton, 1887, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org

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4.1 Adolphe Yvon, Genius of America, 1870, oil on canvas, 29 1/2 feet × 18 feet (899.2 × 548.6 cm), Chancellor’s Hall, New York State Education Building, Albany, NY, formerly Alexander T. Stewart collection. Source: commons.wikimedia.org 4.2 Ludwig Knaus, Children’s Party, c. 1868, 36 × 48 in. (91.4 × 122 cm), oil on canvas, location unknown, formerly Alexander T. Stewart collection. Source: commons.wikimedia.org 4.3 Auguste Toulmouche, Maternal Embraces, 1877, oil on canvas, 28 3/4 × 23 1/2 in. (73.0 × 59.5 cm), private collection Image Courtesy of Skinner, Inc. www.skinnerinc.com 4.4 Hugues Merle, The Good Sister, 1862, watercolor, 7 11/16 × 5 3/4 in. (19.5 × 14.6 cm), the Walters Art Museum, art.thewalters.org. This image is similar to Merle’s Good Sister, life size, present location unknown, formerly August Belmont collection. Source: commons. wikimedia.org 4­ .5 Ludwig Knaus, Road to Ruin, 1876, 32 1/2 × 43 1/4 in. (82.6 × 109.9 cm), formerly William H. Vanderbilt collection. Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s, Inc. © [April 18, 1945] 4.6 John S. Davis, after Charles Landelle, Dolce Far Niente, formerly Collis P. Huntington collection. Source: The Aldine 7, no. 21 (September 1875), cover image 4.7 Jean-François Millet, The Sower, 1850, oil on canvas, 39 1/4 × 31 1/2 in. (99.7 × 80 cm), Yamanashi Prefectural Museum, Kofo, Japan, formerly in the William H. Vanderbilt collection. Source: Clarence Cook, Art and Artists of Our Time (New York: Selmar Hess, 1888), vol. 1, p. 240 4.8 Pierre-Édouard Frère, The Evening Prayer, 1857, oil on panel, 18 5/16 × 15 3/16 in. (46.5 × 38.5 cm). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Source: commons.wikimedia.org 4.9 Alfred Stevens, Ready for the Fancy Dress Ball, 1872, oil on canvas, 35 3/4 × 46 in. (90.8 × 116.8 cm), formerly William H. Vanderbilt collection. Private collection. Photograph Courtesy of Sotheby’s, Inc. © [November 22, 2016] 4.10 Alexandre Cabanel, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe (1828–1887), 1876, oil on canvas, 67 1/2 × 42 3/4 in. (171.5 × 108.6 cm), Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Bequest of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, 1887, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org

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4.11 Alexandre Cabanel, Pia de Tolomei, 1876, oil on canvas, 56 × 39 in. (142.2 × 99.1 cm), present location unknown, formerly William H. Vanderbilt collection. Source: E. Strahan, Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and Collection (Boston, 1883–1884), vol. 3, p. 48 4.12 Hugues Merle, Hamlet and Ophelia, 1873, oil on canvas, 66 × 46 in. (167.6 × 116.8 cm), private collection, formerly Alexander T. Stewart collection. Source: Edward Strahan, Art Treasure of America, vol. 1, opp. p. 40 4.13 Hugues Merle, Ferdinand and Miranda, 1877, oil on canvas, 61 1/4 × 45 1/2 in. (155.5 × 115.6 cm), present location unknown, formerly Collis P. Huntington collection. Source: Description of Pictures Belonging to Collis Potter Huntington (New York: S. I., 1896), vol. 2, p. 88. The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA 4.14 Edouard Detaille, Arrest of the Ambulance Corps in the Eastern Part of France, January, 1871, 1878, oil on canvas, 31 1/2 × 51 1/4 in. (80 × 130 cm), formerly William H. Vanderbilt collection. Source: Edward Strahan, Art Treasure of America, vol. 3, opp. p. 106 4.15 Photo-aquatint by Goupil & Co., 1870, after Alphonse de Neuville, Le Bourget, 1878, platemark 21.5 × 26.4 cm. Original oil on canvas, 68 × 99 in. (172.7 × 251.5 cm), private collection, formerly William H. Vanderbilt collection. Source: Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.16 Hugues Merle, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, 1879, oil on canvas, 22 × 18 1/4 in. (55.9 × 46.4 cm). Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI, formerly Mary Jane Morgan collection. Source: commons. wikimedia.org 4.17 Jean-Jacques Henner, Fabiola, Salon of 1885, 13 × 16 1/2 in. (33 × 41.9 cm), location unknown, formerly Mary Jane Morgan, then Collis P. Huntington collection. Source: commons.wikimedia.org 4.18 François Flameng, after Alexandre Cabanel, Shulamite, 1876, original oil on canvas, 56 × 39 in. (142.2 × 99.1 cm), present location unknown, formerly Catharine Lorillard Wolfe collection. Source: Clarence Cook, Art and Artists of Our Time (New York: Selmar Hess, 1888), vol. 1, opp. p. 74 4­ .19 Gabriel Max, The Last Token: A Christian Martyr, oil on canvas, 67 1/2 × 47 in. (171.5 × 119.4 cm), Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Bequest of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, 1887, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org

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4.20 Jean-Léon Gérôme, Prayer in the Mosque, 1871, Oil on canvas, 35 × 29 1/2 in. (88.9 × 74.9 cm), Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Bequest of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, 1887, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org 4­ .21 Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Sword Dance, 1875, oil on canvas, 42 × 25 in. (106.7 × 63.5 cm), present location unknown, formerly William H. Vanderbilt collection. Source: Edward Strahan, Art Treasure of America, vol. 3, opp. p. 95 4.22 Constant Troyon, On the Road, c. 1850, present location unknown, formerly William Henry Vanderbilt collection. Source: E. Strahan, Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and Collection (Boston, 1883–1884), Holland edition, n.p 5.1 Jean-Léon Gérôme, Pollice verso, 1872, oil on canvas, 40 × 58 in. (97.5 × 146.7 cm), Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ, formerly Alexander T. Stewart collection. Source: commons.wikimedia.org 5.2 William Bouguereau, chromolithograph after Going to the Bath, c. 1865. Source: commons.wikimedia.org. Location of original 39 × 29 1/2 in. (99 × 74.9 cm), from the John Taylor Johnston and later William H. Vanderbilt collections is unknown. See a reduction of Going to the Bath, c. 1865, oil on canvas, 21 3/4 × 18 in. (55.2 × 45.7 cm), Gift of Mrs. Theodora Willard Best, St. Johnsbury Athenaeum, St. Johnsbury, VT 5.3 William Bouguereau, Breton Brother and Sister, 1871, oil on canvas, 50 7/8 × 35 1/8 in. (129.2 × 89.2 cm), Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Bequest of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, 1887, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org 5.4 Jean-François Millet, The Angelus, painted between 1857 and 1859, oil on canvas, 21 7/8 × 26 in. (55.5 × 66 cm), Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. Source: commons.wikimedia.org 6.1 Eugène-Louis Lami, Interior of a Museum, watercolor (recto); graphite (verso), 13 1/8 × 20 1/2 in. (33.4 × 52 cm), Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Bequest of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, 1887, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org 6.2 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Paintings Galleries, Room 17: The Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Gallery; View looking southwest, Photographed ca. 1907. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY

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6.3 Pierre-Auguste Cot, The Storm, 1880, oil on canvas, 92 1/4 × 61 3/4 in. (234.3 × 156.8 cm), Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Bequest of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, 1887, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org 6.4 Engraving by T. V. Desclaux after J. L. Ernest Meissonier, The Painters Willem van de Velde the Younger and Adriaen van de Velde Studying a Painting on an Easel. Source: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) 6.5 Copyist in front of Rosa Bonheur’s Horse Fair, 1889. Source: Ripley Hitchcock, “New York’s Art Museum,” Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly 28, no. 6 (December 1889): 674 6.6 Henry Lerolle, The Organ Rehearsal, 1885, oil on canvas, 93 1/4 × 142 3/4 in. (236.9 × 362.6 cm), Gift of George I. Seney, 1887, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org 7.1 Ground plan with notations by author, Palace of the Fine Arts, World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893. Source: Moses P. (Purnell) Handy, World’s Columbian Exposition Chicago. Revised Catalogue, Department of Fine Arts: With Index of Exhibitors, Official ed. (Chicago: W.B. Conkey Co., 1893), 6 7.2 Claude Monet, Le Matin, temps brumeux, Pourville (Foggy Morning at Pourville), 1882, oil on canvas, 24 × 29 1/8 in. (61 × 74 cm). Birmingham Museum of Art, Museum purchase with funds provided by 1977 and 1980–1983 Museum Dinner and Balls, 1981.40. artsbma.org/collection. Source: commons.wikimedia.org 7.3 Thomas Hovenden, Breaking Home Ties, 1890, oil on canvas, 52 1/8 × 72 1/4 in. (132.4 × 183.5 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA. https://www.philamuseum.org/collections/ permanent/47809.html. Source: commons.wikimedia.org

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­Series Editor’s Introduction Recent titles in the Contextualizing Art Markets series have drawn attention to the sheer variety of individuals, institutions, and agents who contribute to the functioning of different art worlds. In this book, Leanne Zalewski focuses on a particularly dynamic period of collecting and institutional development in the United States that took place in the years between the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867 and the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Zalewski evocatively describes the decades between these two events as the “Gilded Age Picture Rush.” The image she conjures with this phrase is apt. Reminiscent of a scramble for gold, nineteenth-century American collectors avidly sought French artworks to decorate their mansions and to impress their peers. It is the focus of these collectors’ taste in art and the consequences of their buying that are central to Zalewski’s narrative. While studies have been devoted to the rising US interest in Impressionist painting in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, Zalewski demonstrates the powerful hold that French academic painting had over cultural imaginaries and collecting practices between the late 1860s and early 1890s. She effectively makes the case that this interest revealed more than matters of taste. Rather, marketing and acquiring French academic art connected to wider notions of American cultural value, nationhood, and the social importance of collecting itself. By investigating who collected these works, how academic art was promoted and sold, and where private collections of this style of art were created and exhibited, Zalewski demonstrates important connections and tensions between public and private spheres of art enjoyment. This was an era of collecting, she points out, that used art to encode and reinforce moral and social values that were endorsed by an elite minority based primarily in New York. In consequence, part of the importance of these collections is to reveal the “stereotypes and prejudices of an age.” The image of the Gilded Age Picture Rush that emerges in the following chapters does more, however, than demonstrate the interests of a group of collectors at a particular moment in time. It also reveals the risks involved in collecting art. Who determines whether an artwork will stand the test of time? Will a private collection be considered worthy of display by a public institution? What kind of social or critical endorsement does a collector seek to validate

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Series Editor’s Introduction

personal choices? Zalewski explores cases that illuminate both the thrills and disappointments of collecting. Her account of the acquisition practices of New York collectors also serves as an important counterpoint to histories that chart the rising interest in avant-garde painting in the final decades of the century. As tastes changed and interest in French academic painting waned, so too collectors began to reflect on their own private histories of art acquisition and the consequences of their choices. If the works collected during the Gilded Age Picture Rush no longer appeared modern to some audiences at the end of the century, was that a sign of misplaced interest or could collectors conceive of themselves as having documented a particular historical moment? What was the attraction of the “modern” and did it matter? By pursuing these and related questions, Zalewski sheds new light on marketing strategies, art critical discourses, taste-making strategies, and competing institutional ambitions. Zalewski’s book is an important addition to the Contextualizing Art Markets series in its use of history to prompt reflection on the present. The Gilded Age Picture Rush has a counterpart in the twenty-first-century appetite for modern and contemporary art. In addition to its contribution to art history, the following discussion encourages readers to consider the public implications of contemporary private collecting, to reflect on the role of cultural elites, and to debate the extent to which museums represent the interests of diverse publics. The Gilded Age Picture Rush may be over, but Zalewski shows that some of its motivating ideas have powerful legacies. Kathryn Brown Loughborough

A ­ cknowledgments The seeds of this book germinated two decades ago (!) in graduate school. During that time, I received support from academic mentors, colleagues, friends, and family at different stages of this long journey. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Drs. Andrea Lepage and Lindsay Twa, who both kept me writing and revising this book since 2013. Anonymous reviewers offered excellent suggestions for moving this project forward. Drs. Cameron Brewer and Audra King commented on late drafts of several chapters. Drs. Danielle Currier and Jennifer Gauthier commented on earlier drafts. Rachel LePine inadvertently helped me overcome writer’s block at one point. Dr. Patricia Mainardi, my dissertation advisor, and Drs. Sally Webster, Diane Kelder, Petra Chu, and Gerald Ackerman offered sage advice when I was writing the dissertation. Other colleagues and friends, including Maggie Stenz, Elizabeth Watson, Heather Lemonedes, Christian Huemer, Allison Moore, Jennifer Katanic, Nancy Minty, and Cindy Buckner, read various parts when it was a dissertation. I also thank the Gambin family and Melinda Arsouze. I am indebted to many other individuals for their assistance, some of whom have since moved on to other positions. I thank Barbara File and James Moske at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives; Shelley Bennett, who generously shared her research files with me at the Huntington Library; Peter Trippi, Roger Diederen, Stephen Edidin, and Lisa Small formerly at the Dahesh Museum of Art; Melissa De Medeiros, formerly at Knoedler Gallery; Robert and Elisabeth Kashey and David Wojciechowski at Shepherd W & K Galleries; David Christie at the New York Public Library; Meghan Constantinou at the Grolier Club; Teri Blasko at the Saratoga Room, Saratoga Springs Public Library; Agnes Hamberger at Saratoga Springs History Museum in the Casino in Congress Park; Kathleen Coleman at the Saratoga County Historical Society & Museum Brookside; Lauren Doherty Roberts, Saratoga County Historian, Saratoga County Clerk’s Office, Ballston Spa; Steve Dunham at the New York State Education Building; Stephane Houry-Towner at the Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Asher Miller and Mary Chan at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Rachael Merrison at the National Gallery Archives, London.

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­Acknowledgment

In addition, I am grateful to the staffs of the Watson Library; Frick Art Reference Library—especially Suz Massen, librarian extraordinaire; New York Public Library; Avery Library at Columbia University; Mina Rees Library at the Graduate Center; Special Collections at the Getty Research Institute; the Ingersoll Library at the Cleveland Museum of Art; St. Louis Art Museum Archives; Walters Art Museum Archives; Archives of American Art; the Boston Public Library; the Hunt Library of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Art Library at the National Gallery of Art, Dublin. Catherine Lotspiech at Randolph College and Sarah White at Central Connecticut State University brokered numerous interlibrary loans on my behalf. Google Books, Hathitrust, archive.org, Gallica, and other online sources have also saved time, travel, and money. Research in France provided valuable information. I thank Pierre-Lin Renié at the Musée Goupil in Bordeaux; Elisabeth Larigaudrie at J. P. Morgan Chase Bank, N. A., Paris; and Dominique Jardillier at the Palais de Luxembourg. Dr. Philippe Bordes kindly shared his personal files with me prior to their disposition at the Musée Fabre, Montpellier. I also thank Sylvain Amic at the Musée Fabre, Montpellier; Cyrille Sciama in Nantes; and Jessica Himanga at the American Embassy in Paris. I must also thank Maude Gichané, Stijn Alsteens and Hans Buijs for their kind assistance at the Fondation Custodia, Institut Néerlandais, and the helpful staffs of the Archives nationales, Bibliothèque nationale, Documentation at the Musée d’Orsay, Archives de Paris, Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Archives du Louvre, Manuscrits de la Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, Bibliothèque de l’Hôtel de Ville, Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris, and the Médiathèque centrale d’Agglomération Émile Zola in Montpellier. Various grants and fellowships aided in my research: two CSUAAUP Research Grants; a Maurice L. Mednick Memorial Grant, Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges; two Professional Development grants, Randolph College; a Short-Term Senior Fellowship, the Center for the History of Collecting at The Frick Collection; and a Diane and Trevor Morris Fellowship, the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. While this book was in its dissertation stages, I received a Library Research Grant, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; the John Rewald Dissertation Fellowship, CUNY; CUNY Research Grant; Victorian Society in America Summer School Scholarship (and the fabulous Dr. Richard Guy Wilson); the Harmon Chadbourn Rorison

­Acknowledgment

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Fellowship from the Institut Français de Washington; and stipends for travel from the Sue Rosenberg Zalk Student Travel and Research Fund, CUNY. A final thanks go to my parents, family, and friends who offered support and sympathetic ears over the years and to my fuzzy desk buddies, Earnest and Clover, who sadly passed away in 2021.

P ­ reface French academic art captured my attention as an undergraduate intern at Wildenstein & Co., New York. Image after image of Jean-Jacques Henner’s red-haired women in profile passed through my fingers. Why had I never seen any work by this artist? Although Henner and other academic artists were not taught in my university courses, my curiosity led me to research the subject when I entered graduate school. Then the paintings led me to various nineteenth-century collectors who owned academic art. Researching the August Belmont, William Henry Vanderbilt, William T. Walters, Collis P. Huntington, Alexander T. Stewart, and Catharine Lorillard Wolfe collections in turn led me to the dealer Samuel P. Avery. As an undergraduate at Columbia University, I spent hours in Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, sitting at desks near Avery’s portrait, not fully comprehending his stamp on New York culture until I began my graduate studies. My research also led me to the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had not stepped foot into an art museum until I was eighteen. When unusual circumstances led me to reside temporarily a block away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I started visiting and never stopped. My experiences wandering the vast halls of treasures at the Met inspired me to major in art history, and it holds a special place in my heart for that reason. The museum’s treasures revealed a whole new life-changing world for me. Leanne Zalewski New Britain, CT

F ­ oreword The story is a familiar one: Americans discovering and acquiring French art, publicizing their collections, donating them to American arts institutions, and invoking a more worldly vision of the fine arts. These collections have, in fact, often been foundational for the growth and importance of American museums. The beginning of this phenomenon in the second half of the nineteenth century— favoring French academic painters—has not, however, received the equivalent attention directed to the later transatlantic movement of European Old Master, Impressionist and Modernist artworks that are the popular attractions of so many American museums today. The collectors who created this first wave of European masterworks are also perhaps less well known than those who enriched American museums in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but they are historically important. This initial art market phenomenon, termed “the Gilded Age picture rush” by Leanne Zalewski, is the subject of her important contribution to the history of art collecting, including its role in the birth of significant institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The importance of the 1867 Paris Universal Exposition and a network of influential international dealers led a host of wealthy Americans to concentrate their collection efforts on the most influential and popular French artists of the day, notably academic painters like William Bouguereau, Alexandre Cabanel, Jean-Léon Gérôme, and Jehan-Georges Vibert. Mainstream art history neglected or even disdained these artists during much of the twentieth century, diminishing their inclusion in the histories of American taste. Leanne Zalewski is among those historians who have in recent years re-evaluated the significance and artistic merit of academic art. When the Dahesh Museum, specializing in academic art, opened in 1995, she was its first volunteer, providing docent tours. Since then, she has established herself as an excellent scholar and teacher. I congratulate her for this publication that richly confirms the importance of European academic art in American cultural history. J. David Farmer Director of Exhibitions, Dahesh Museum of Art

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Introduction Following the American Civil War (1861–1865), rampant materialism characterized the Gilded Age (c. 1870–1914). A few families accumulated enormous wealth by relying on working-class labor. They wielded tremendous power to change the economic, social, ideological, and cultural landscape of the postwar United States.1 One significant aspect of change involved art, specifically French art, as an educational and symbolic tool of the status-conscious nouveauxriches. In Europe, Paris was the center of the art world. French arts’ civilizing effects would help New York become the cultural capital of the United States.2 However, as novelist Henry James noted, Americans’ full cultural potential had not yet been realized by the 1860s. He complained to his mother in 1869 that Americans abroad seem a people of character, we seem to have energy, capacity and intellectual stuff in ample measure. What I have pointed at as our vices are the elements of modern man with culture quite left out. It’s the absolute and incredible lack of culture that strikes you in common travelling Americans.3

In other words, Americans appeared crass, uncultured, and unsophisticated compared to their European counterparts. “Common travelling Americans” were the wealthier Americans who could afford travel. Presumably the average stateside American’s cultural competence fared even worse. Over the course of two decades following the Civil War, US collectors, critics, and dealers worked to redress the United States’ cultural incompetence so clearly articulated by Henry James. A core group of New York City’s wealthiest collectors, not copycat or investment collectors, became the leading cultural arbiters. They include August Belmont, John Taylor Johnston, William Henry Vanderbilt, Collis Potter Huntington, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, and Alexander T. Stewart. Yet the United States’ reputation abroad remained insecure into the 1880s. When railroad magnate Collis Potter Huntington wrote to his friend,

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The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

R.  M. McLane, the United States Minister to Paris, he evoked the persistent general concern for international reputation at the individual level. He wrote, We like to have all such men as yourself remain in the country and I am afraid we need them all; but it is probably more important that our representation abroad should be by our foremost citizens and men of tact and culture, and in this view we can afford to suffer a loss at home for a gain abroad.4

McLane’s tactful demeanor and cosmopolitanism reflect what Huntington and James deemed lacking in most Americans and strove to change in part through collecting, institutionalizing, and learning from and about fine art. Wealthy Americans sought approval from and parity with the European aristocracy and bourgeoisie.5 An expanding international art market, cohesive social structures, and growing knowledge networks made collecting possible. Dealer Samuel P. Avery, a self-trained art professional, served as a liaison among the dealers, artists, collectors, and institutions in New York. Avery in turn relied on George A. Lucas, an American dealer based in Paris, as well as Paris-based dealers such as Goupil & Cie. Aided by knowledgeable dealers, the collectors, as self-appointed civic stewards or “capitalist philanthropists,” rapidly assembled art collections of established contemporary French academic artists such as Jean-Léon Gérôme, William Bouguereau, Ernest Meissonier, Alexandre Cabanel, Alphonse de Neuville, Edouard Detaille, Jehan-George Vibert, Hugues Merle, and PierreÉdouard Frère.6 Jean-François Millet and Jules Breton, who painted country peasants, were popular, as were Barbizon landscape painters Charles Daubigny and Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Peña and cow painter Constant Troyon. Barbizon School refers to artists who painted in the French countryside in the Forest of Fontainebleau.7 Paintings by Belgian, Spanish, Hungarian, Italian, German, and other academic artists who exhibited at the Paris Salon also figured in these collections.

Methods and Historiography This book approaches the Gilded Age picture rush through a sociohistorical framework. It focuses on the largely overlooked post–Civil War trend in collecting primarily French academic painting. Historian Lillian B. Miller’s book,

Introduction

3

Patrons and Patriotism: The Encouragement of the Fine Arts in the United States, 1790–1860, serves as a point of departure.8 As Miller explained, Americans at mid-century, driven by a sense of cultural inferiority, addressed the nation’s lack of art institutions with some successes and many failures. In their philanthropic roles, industrialists and businessmen succeeded where their less affluent forebears achieved only limited success. The art market depends on networks of informed artists, patrons, dealers, art professionals, and art institutions. In these early years, the United States lacked professionally trained art historians, art critics, or art experts to direct the arts, and little solid infrastructure existed for the fine arts market.9 They also lacked access to the international art market. This would change after the Civil War ended. In this book, I emphasize the collectors’ role in the formation of the United States’ cultural reputation. The artists, collectors, critics, and dealers first educated themselves in order to educate others, and the fine arts played a significant role in increasing the United States’ cultural competence. As John Ott argued in Manufacturing the Modern Patron, West Coast Gilded Age industrialists exercised great agency in purposefully forming art collections that validated their socioeconomic gains.10 East Coast collectors acquired art not only to validate their wealth and social status but also to create ideal worlds that reflected their upper-class, white ideologies and aspirations for a harmonious, cultured society. Dealers’, collectors’, and critics’ perspectives recorded in diaries, letters, stock books, art history surveys, journals, newspapers, and archival sources form the basis of this sociohistorical analysis. These sources provide a wealth of information regarding the collectors and their collections and attest to the networks formed by dealers, collectors, critics, and artists. Over the last several decades, research on art dealer networks, patronage, class formation, and the acquisition, display, dispersal, and consumption of art has increased.11 This book builds on work by prominent scholars who have examined Gilded Age collecting and have ascribed this collecting phenomenon to the auction system (Ott), class identity (Ott, Beckert, Ayres, Bolin, Duffy), to investment interests and capitalism (Fink, Troyen, Boime), and to the art dealers (Skalet, Fidell-Beaufort, Goldstein, Penot).12 Art historian Albert Boime credited the emergence of a modern business system to the change, which coincided with increased buying power in the 1870s.13 Postwar prosperity allowed for picture buying. Anne Bolin and Henry Duffy argued that the formation of private art galleries within domestic design served didactic purposes in addition to signifying social class.14

4

The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

Improved technology enabled more frequent transatlantic travel after the Civil War.15 This increased cultural mobility, or movement of people and art between Europe and the United States, allowed for cultural exchanges and intersections between dealers, artists, and collectors to take place.16 All of these factors contributed to the Gilded Age picture rush during this complex and rapidly changing period; however, several factors have not been fully examined. My philanthropic focus differs from the standard narrative and treats capitalists from an unusual perspective, the ideological aspect of their collecting in promoting the kind of upper-class white world they desired. As René Brimo observed in the early twentieth century: perhaps no period has been more concerned with the common good, with public education and the commonweal. Given the entire lack of governmental policy in this regard, in its place, so-called plutocrats, perhaps less materialist than most [Americans], founded churches, hospitals, universities, and museums.17

Capitalists are typically maligned for their business practices or studied only for class formation. I am interested in the pictures themselves, the collectors’ prominent role in promoting art, and in the institutionalization of the art—in other words, how this cultural capital formed, rather than on the collectors’ business or social aspirations. Pursuit of class formation has already been well argued by scholars such as John Ott and Sven Beckert. Ott, who writes from a Marxist perspective, dismissed the collectors’ educative claim solely as a sugar coating for elite-class formation.18 Gabriel Weisberg and Barbara Weinberg attributed it to a Veblenian pursuit of status.19 However, these collectors’ contributions were more nuanced. Collectors created New York City institutions to serve an educative function that I personally benefitted from—the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Public Library, Metropolitan Opera, American Museum of Natural History, Bronx Zoo, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, and more. Wealthy individuals did acquire art as status markers—including the men and women in this study, but a philanthropic bent (one not encouraged by tax deductions) can and did coexist with the status-conscious side of collecting. The capitalist-philanthropists attempted to serve the communities that they also repressed. As historian Lawrence Friedman noted, “If philanthropists can be universally characterized at all, it is by the energy behind their desires to

Introduction

5

transform the insufficiently civil world that is into the world that might be.”20 Their energy, resources, and motivation led to this exciting period’s newly formed major cultural institutions, notably the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The collectors and dealers such as Avery, Lucas, Knoedler, and Goupil became a significant part of the narrative. The international art market enabled this transformation.

­Defining the Gilded Age Picture Rush This book concerns the New York market for French art during the early Gilded Age (c. 1865–1895).21 For the sake of brevity, I will refer to the United States’ first major art spending spree as the “Gilded Age picture rush.” While European aristocrats had been forming magnificent art collections for centuries (often via war or theft) and later the bourgeoisie, few significant art collections existed in the United States prior to the Civil War. Private art collecting began slowly as awareness of the arts and the means and drive to collect it grew as the nation itself prospered. The Gilded Age picture rush began during the 1860s, reached its climax in the late 1870s through mid-1880s, plateaued by the late 1880s, and began to decline by the early 1890s, which coincided with an economic depression. By the 1890s, another picture rush began when collectors sought Old Master paintings (created between c. 1300 and 1800) and French Impressionist paintings.22 The Gilded Age picture rush is roughly bracketed by the 1867 Universal Exposition in Paris and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Although several international exhibitions took place between those years, these two expositions helped determine the course of collecting European art in the United States. The expositions also served a significant role in the Gilded Age picture rush, particularly by inciting a greater awareness of the United States’ international reputation in the fine arts. By the 1867 Universal Exposition, the fragile, tenuously united country’s fine arts paled in comparison to France’s sophisticated artwork and infrastructure. With a favorable economic environment in place, the 1867 Universal Exposition coincided with the complex ideological changes that led to the rush. By the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, US collectors had successfully amassed many French and other European paintings as well as European and Asian decorative art treasures.

6

The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

The Pictures Gilded Age picture rush collections centered primarily on French pictures, and narrative genre painting comprised the bulk of the collections. French academic art produced largely by alumni of the prestigious Paris Ecole des beaux-arts (School of Fine Arts) sold for high prices. Academic artists such as Gérôme, Bouguereau, Meissonier, Cabanel, Merle, and Vibert painted figural works that appeared realistic, with a highly finished surface and invisible brushstrokes, or finis. Academic art also refers to art produced by students who attended the art academies of Europe and exhibited their art at the Paris Salons. “Academic” and “Salon” both refer to these artists, whose style and national origins differed. As art historian Barbara Gallati explained, an academic finis, this smooth facture, symbolized sophistication and refinement, as opposed to rough facture, which appeared crude and unrefined.23 Thus, works by these artists ranked among the most prestigious and expensive works. Their elegant, impeccable paintings drew admiration while reflecting the high moral character of their owners and the morals aimed at civilizing the population. Other popular artists, such as German artist Ludwig Knaus and the Barbizon artists, painted with a relatively tight facture but not with the invisible brushwork of the academic finis. The Spanish artists, Eduardo Zamacois, Raimundo Madrazo, and Mariano Fortuny, were admired for their dazzling brushwork. However, broad, loose, Impressionist-style facture such as that of Claude Monet would have appeared too unrefined and thus reflected undesirable traits. In addition, Americans admired hard work, and leading art critic James Jackson Jarves, among others, acknowledged the laborious technique of the academic painters. Although many paintings of the Gilded Age picture rush disappeared from art historical consciousness, today they are hidden in plain sight, displayed in museums both here and abroad. Yet the importance of this era’s art collections has not been fully acknowledged because the academic artworks collected began to fall out of favor by the 1890s, when the second wave of the rush to secure Europe’s Old Master and French Impressionist treasures began in earnest. Prior research has focused on paintings by well-known French Realist or  Impressionist painters, but few of these works entered collections until the mid-1890s.24 Instead, French painting reigned supreme as evidenced in the

Introduction

7

three-volume Art Treasures of America by Edward Strahan (pseudonym for Earl Shinn). He proudly documented collections across the United States in the late 1870s and early 1880s.25 Some leading artists, such as Gérôme, Bouguereau Meissonier, and Cabanel, have garnered attention within the last few decades.26 Work by other artists such as Alphonse de Neuville, Edouard Detaille, JehanGeorge Vibert, Hugues Merle, Adolphe Yvon, Pierre-Édouard Frère, and Auguste Toulmouche also figure in the upcoming chapters.27

­The Collectors and Dealers Examining the combined contributions of leading collectors and the dealers who helped shape their collections sheds new light on efforts to establish New York as a capital of culture. In pursuit of their aims to collect, educate, and improve the United States’ national reputation, they helped shape the art market, art institutions, art history surveys, and US culture. Concerns for civic stewardship within the United States and for international reputation helped fuel collecting fervor. The collectors in this book bought artworks to amass in longlasting collections, not solely as financial investments to resell at a later date. They also articulated a desire for art to serve educational goals that reflected their ideal social, racial, and gender order. As art historian Saul Zalesch noted, the economics of private patronage necessitated educational aims for fine arts collection and display.28 Without state or federal support, patronage of the arts became an obligation of the wealthy, what they would have considered as noblesse oblige. In terms of social capital, these self-styled civic stewards worked on behalf of larger bodies: their social class, New York City, and the country at large.29 Although interest in civic stewardship declined as a desire to create class distinctions grew, it still held sway during this transitional period when key collectors (Stewart, Belmont, Huntington) and dealers (Samuel P. Avery, Michael Knoedler) built their fortunes from scratch. Their working-class beginnings instilled a greater sense of social responsibility. Without these philanthropies, New York City as well as the rest of the United States would be a very different place. An international network of dealers facilitated the transatlantic crossing of the artworks. Samuel P. Avery served as one of the primary dealers, a liaison, expert, and advisor for these collectors. By all accounts, Avery was the most

8

The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

knowledgeable and honest dealer in New York City. His close relationship with George A. Lucas, an American based in Paris, helped American collections grow. Adolphe Goupil’s Paris gallery, Goupil & Cie., sold numerous pictures to dealers and to collectors. German immigrants William Schaus and Michael Knoedler served as Goupil’s agents in New York City, but they soon formed their own picture shops.30 Other dealers based in New York City, Paris, London, and occasionally other European cities supplied works to the American collectors, but Avery, Lucas, Goupil & Co., Knoedler & Co., and Schaus, whose gallery records are not extant, were the primary dealers.

C ­ hapter Summaries Each chapter of this book addresses a different aspect of the first Gilded Age picture rush. The 1867 Universal Exposition’s role in the rush is analyzed in Chapter  2. August Belmont was one of very few American collectors who bought European paintings prior to the 1867 Paris Universal Exposition, but collectors across the United States purchased them for high prices afterward.31 Many New York collectors were directly involved in planning or lending works to the exposition’s US fine arts section. In investigating the nascent New York art world, this chapter probes American critics’ harsh words for American art, weak encouragement from major French critics, and lack of state support, all combining to create the circumstances that inspired American dealers and collectors to make drastic changes in the arts. Through an analysis of the discourse surrounding the United States’ display, which so often amounted to critical disappointment with American art combined with a critical reverence for French art, this chapter examines a crucial moment in American history in which collectors were poised to abandon American paintings in favor of European. Chapter  3 introduces the dealers and their international art market connections that enabled the Gilded Age picture rush. The concerted efforts of American dealers Samuel P. Avery, George Lucas, and Michael Knoedler; English dealer Ernest Gambart; and French dealers, notably Goupil & Co., developed an international art market network. This chapter draws upon primary texts including dealer stock books and diaries to consider the American and French dealers’ roles in initiating and feeding the rush. Building upon this analysis, the chapter contextualizes the rush at its plateau during the 1870s and 1880s,

Introduction

9

exemplified by increased market value in leading French Academic painters, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Ernest Meissonier, William Bouguereau, and Alexandre Cabanel. The chapter concludes with a comparison of the major sales of the 1870s (John Taylor Johnston, August Belmont) and 1880s (Alexander T. Stewart, Mary Jane Morgan) that signaled the plateau. By comparison, it analyzes several key auction sales that took place in New York and examines the average sales prices for French paintings, which remained significantly higher than for American paintings throughout the 1870s and 1880s. Drawing from collection and auction catalogs, Chapter  4 offers a novel comparison of seven New York City collections, those of August Belmont, John Taylor Johnston, William H. Vanderbilt, Alexander T. Stewart, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, Mary Jane Morgan, and Collis P. Huntington. A close analysis of the pictures’ subject matter, which I divide into twelve categories, offers insight on white, upper-class American ideologies and reflects gender, race, and class expectations. A key work, Adolphe Yvon’s Genius of America, encapsulates these beliefs, although genre paintings constituted the majority of the collections. This chapter also provides a fresh examination of genre paintings by artists such as Hugues Merle, Edouard Frère, and Jehan-Georges Vibert previously overlooked as sentimental and unimportant. Analyzing these works creates a fuller picture of the moral and ideological function of artworks. Understanding how the pictures functioned as educational and aspirational tools provides a completely new perspective on these underacknowledged artworks. Chapter 5 examines the means through which collectors and their collections were marketed and reached a broader public. These include loan exhibitions, collection and auction catalogs, journals, newspapers, art history surveys, dictionaries, and prints. Collectors’ names appeared in print alongside the artworks in their collections, and exhibitions were organized by collectors’ names. Printed materials are distinct in their impulse to highlight the role of art purchasers by including collectors’ names. This analysis reveals that the collectors’ names were closely linked with the art and became inseparable from the art historical narrative. Once the collections had been formed, their educational and ideological functions could only be fully achieved if exhibited for the public. The pictures moved from the art market to the art museum. Chapter 6 discusses the first important collection of contemporary European art on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Until 1887, pictures remained in private collections only occasionally accessible to the public, if at all. In that year, bequests by Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, Henry Hilton, Cornelius Vanderbilt,

10

The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

and George Seney finally helped situate New York as an international cultural power and placed an academic art collection on view for the public’s edification. Although this important first collection is historically significant, it has been largely discounted by previous scholars because it comprised academic art that was out of fashion by the early twentieth century. This generation of collectors active during the 1870s and 1880s created a blueprint for cultural institutions, future collectors, and philanthropists.32 Many of the collectors, as well as dealer Samuel P. Avery, helped form and administer the museum. Once cultural capital in the form of art had been acquired, documented, and displayed for the public during the first wave of the Gilded Age picture rush, another international fair, the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, indicated an end of an era. Chapter  7 explains the significance of the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in bringing the Gilded Age picture rush to its natural conclusion. The earlier generation of dealers, collectors, and critics furthered the infrastructure through aggressively building social, educational, and institutional capital. Through an analysis of contemporary criticism of French and American art exhibited at the fair, this chapter explains why the next generation of American collectors and philanthropists began looking beyond the recently established contemporary French academic artists. American artists asserted their “Americanness” at this fair, and a sophisticated display called Foreign Masterpieces Owned in the United States, which included works by French Impressionist artists, showed that the fine arts in the United States had shifted its focus and a new era in collecting began to emerge. This fair signaled a generational shift as older collectors, critics, dealers, and artists passed away and younger ones with changing tastes emerged. The upcoming chapters reveal the significant roles played by collectors, dealers, and artists active in the international art market during the early Gilded Age picture rush.

­2

Paris’s Guiding Light: The Universal Exposition of 1867

Turning from our own meagre and unsatisfactory [American fine arts] gallery [. . .] France was the only one that may be said to have been in any sense complete.1 —Frank Leslie, 1868 This despairing statement, published after the 1867 Universal Exposition, summed up the perception that the American fine arts display paled in comparison to the French. International fairs fostered a competitive spirit among nations in all aspects of arts and industry, with each country represented by its finest. For the United States, recently rattled by the Civil War, the World’s Fair provided an opportunity to present a positive national and aesthetic identity. Frank Leslie, prominent publisher and illustrator, acknowledged the significance of these international exhibitions as the best means of judging each country’s merits.2 Participation in these fairs exposed strengths as well as deficiencies on the international stage and spurred on rivalries among participating countries. The largest international exhibition to date, the 1867 Universal Exposition in Paris shone as a celebration of French art and industry on French soil, the crowning jewel of Napoleon III’s Second Empire. Paris itself was a modern marvel. Baron Haussmann’s sweeping changes in the urban landscape created a culture of spectacle. Over 11 million people from all nations (7.5 million more than the 1855 Paris Universal Exposition) traveled to the French capital in 1867 during its seven-month run from April 1 to October 31.3 At the fair, thirty-two countries with around 50,000 exhibitors amazed visitors and introduced them to the latest technologies, to fine and commercial art, and to other cultures. Although the French occupied most of the exhibition space in each category, the United States attracted some attention for its industry. US industries,

12

The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

including Steinway & Son and Chickering & Son pianos, the Corliss engine, Cyrus McCormick’s reaping machine, Howe sewing machines, and J. Allen & Son’s artificial teeth, won various gold medals for manufactures. US fine arts, however, received only one silver medal, for Frederick Edwin Church’s Niagara. In contrast, the French art display, the largest with 626 entries, won the most medals (thirty-two), and its art emerged as a shining example for the world— again, despite the small space allotted for the fine arts in general. Many American collectors such as John Taylor Johnston, A. T. Stewart, and Robert L. Stuart lent their paintings, and Samuel P. Avery organized the exhibition. Johnston, Stuart, William T. Blodgett, and Marshall O. Roberts, among other collectors, served on the advisory committee. Other members included art dealer Michael Knoedler and travel writer and art critic Henry T.  Tuckerman. Together they assembled “nearly 100 of the most valuable paintings from our private galleries.”4 Additionally, Stewart served as president of the Honorary Commission representing the United States at the fair. New York newspaper accounts before the fair opened reveal how proud the Americans felt at the selection of their best works to display in an international exhibition, but the New York Times’ prediction that the American fine arts section would “command attention” for its art “of the highest character” proved false.5 The small United States fine arts section of eighty-two artworks nearly passed unnoticed. Visitors preferred Carleton Watkins’ and Lawrence & Houseworth’s Western US photographs exhibited with displays of raw materials, minerals, and instruments to American paintings exhibited in the US fine arts.6 Embarrassment at the perceived failure of the US fine arts section in an international context helped motivate change. American critics and collectors sought change to improve the United States’ international standing after this experience. American critics judged American art with disdain. Harshly verbalizing the sentiment of most critics, James Jackson Jarves, arguably the most influential American critic up to this time, found the average American artist and patron “uninformed and uncultured” and desperately in need of guidance.7 American art lacked both respect and a distinct national style. In his official Report on the Fine Arts, Frank Leslie stated that “[f]ew of the pictures had a distinctive, still less a distinctively American character.” For Leslie, only Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life in the South (Old Kentucky Home) appeared “American.”8 This is a curious choice given that its subjects are enslaved people of color. The fair also highlighted the United States’ lack of institutional capital, a governmentsupported infrastructure in the arts, from art schools to art museums. However

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13

dismissed, American art still held promise, according to a few condescending French critics who judged American art more graciously than did the American critics. With proper training American artists would eventually come into their own, but in 1867 their art appeared naive and unguided.9 Americans were outsiders in the European world of fine arts, when instead they thought they made a fine showing. At the exposition, foreign art schools surrounded the US fine arts display, making comparisons immediate. Americans were unprepared for a lukewarm, condescending, or absent critical reaction from the French. American artists appeared as awkward, immature teenagers in a large party of sophisticated French adults. The French example became the guide or teacher, and the Americans the students.

The American Committee for the 1867 Exposition Most immediately affected by the American fine arts’ weak reception were the American committee members, the leading art dealers and collectors who planned the fine arts section and lent works. These financially successful men would feel the embarrassment most keenly. At the time of the 1867 exposition, a tightly connected group of New Yorkers, most associated with the primary art institution, the National Academy of Design, led the American art world. Three prominent National Academy members, genre painter Edwin White and landscape painters Frederic Edwin Church and Jasper Cropsey, met to discuss the organization of the American fine arts section. Rather than serve on the committee themselves, however, they advised the formation of a selection committee with fifteen members.10 Eschewing judgment of each other’s works, no artists served on the committee. This differed from the 1855 Universal Exposition, where the ten artists then living in Paris assembled the small American fine arts section themselves. Thus, in 1867, the art makers shifted the role of cultural broker to art dealers, collectors, and writers, thirteen from New York City and most affiliated with the Century Association an exclusive organization for writers, collectors, artists, and art amateurs.11 The Century meetings provided the social network needed to direct the arts. Together they, rather than artists, carefully selected the American artworks on which the United States’ international reputation would rest. Full of pride and patriotism, as the New York Tribune noted, “the patriotism of the owners [lenders] cannot be too highly commended.”12 They believed American art was on par with their European counterparts.

14

The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

Lacking trained, professional art critics, collectors and dealers seemed the most qualified individuals in international art matters. Dramatist and diplomat William J. Hoppin served as chairman of the committee, and Samuel P. Avery and Michael Knoedler assisted him. In Paris, Hoppin served as the sole American juror on the international fine arts jury of the Universal Exposition. Hoppin, who was instrumental in establishing the Century in 1846, was probably appointed as chairman of the selection committee because of his status at the Century. His friend, William Seward, United States Secretary of State, appointed him to the post. Though a playwright, Hoppin had actively promoted American art as an officer of the American Art-Union and editor of its Bulletin, which was published from 1848 to 1851. He would later write articles on art for European and American journals. In addition, his younger brother, artist Thomas F. Hoppin, studied first in Philadelphia and then in 1837 in Paris under Paul Delaroche, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s teacher.13 Committee member Henry T. Tuckerman helped establish legitimacy for American artists and patrons through his books, including Sketches of American Painters (1847).14 The publication of Book of the Artists (1867), a major history of American art and artists that evolved from Sketches, coincided with the 1867 exposition.15 Tuckerman acted as the authoritative voice conferring status on American artists and patrons before and at the time of the exposition and made positive general comments on the state of the fine arts in the United States in comparison to Europe. In his book, he provided biographies for nearly all the American artists who participated in the exposition. Among them were Albert Bierstadt, Frederick Edwin Church, Sanford Gifford, Charles Loring Elliott, Jasper Cropsey, Asher B. Durand, George Inness, Eastman Johnson, John F. Kensett, Daniel Huntington, and Worthington Whittredge. In addition, the appendix listed the main collectors of American art at the time; seven out of the ten New York collectors listed served on the selection committee.16 These wealthy businessmen, including Marshall O. Roberts, Robert L. Stuart, William T. Blodgett, and John Taylor Johnston, all possessed small collections of American art ranging from fortyone to just over a hundred works each.17 Notably Johnston, who made his fortune in railroads, would later become a founding member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its first president. Johnston housed his American art collection in his Fifth Avenue home located a few blocks from the Tenth Street Studio Building, a mecca for American art.

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15

His brother, financier James Boorman Johnston, backed the well-known Tenth Street Studio Building, which was opened in 1857, and made art-shopping convenient for him. The building provided work and exhibition space for American artists such as Whittredge, Bierstadt, Church, and Gifford, who had studios in the building in the 1860s and whose works would be included in the 1867 exposition.18 Although each committee member served to some degree, Avery played the key role. By this time, Avery had been active in the New York art world for almost three decades as a printmaker, though as a dealer only for the previous three years. As Commissioner of the Fine Arts Division for the United States, Avery supervised the shipping and installation of American artworks at the Universal Exposition in Paris.19 Avery and the other committee members assembled seventy-five paintings for the exhibit. Eleven of the fifteen committee members, including Avery, Knoedler, Blodgett, and Johnston, lent about a third of the total number of works in the exposition. Hudson River School landscape artists, still among the most popular and established painters in the United States, dominated the American section. In addition to Hudson River School landscapes, there were some scenes relating to the Civil War, genre scenes, history paintings, and portraits. Among the entries were James Abbot McNeil Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. I: The White Girl; Bierstadt’s Rocky Mountains; and Johnson’s Old Kentucky Home, all considered canonical today. The ex-patriate Whistler, who left the United States in 1855 never to return, nearly exhibited in the British section but requested to exhibit his four works in the American section instead.20 Johnston lent Church’s Niagara and Homer’s Prisoners from the Front, among the only successfully received American paintings at the 1867 exposition. William Morris Hunt and Whistler lent their own works. Hunt, a veteran of the 1855 Universal Exposition, brought his family to Paris in May of 1866 in order to prepare for the 1867 exposition. While there he added seven portraits to his selection, bringing his total entries to twelve, the largest single exhibitor of the American artists, and the final total in the United States section to eighty-two paintings.21 These pictures were among those that represented the best art the postwar United States had to offer in an international exhibition. Although the New York Observer and Chronicle pronounced the American fine arts section a success on opening day, time would reveal quite the opposite.22

16

The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

­“The Fine Art Department Not Competitive” Discourses in journals, newspapers, and books about American and French art at the fair shaped this period in United States art history. Tracing the American critics’ reactions to their own exhibition as well as to the French fine arts exhibition reveals an acute awareness of the United States’ poor international cultural reputation. American critics and writers broadly covered the Paris Universal Exposition and most of them found little to praise in the American fine arts section. Most of the American works seemed provincial compared to French painting. Leslie, Tuckerman, and Jarves offered the most extensive commentaries. Leslie, who published Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (1855–1891), a popular weekly with news, art reviews, and sports, served as United States Commissioner to the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867. As commissioner, he published his official Report on the Fine Arts.23 Tuckerman and Jarves published exposition criticism in their own books.24 In addition, various named and unnamed correspondents published reviews in major newspapers and journals.25 Across the board, American critics complained about the poor quality of their fine arts, and French critics scarcely discussed it.26 Their dismissive commentary would set the tone for the future of the fine arts in New York. The American works on display—even Church’s award-winning painting, Niagara (1857), a realistic depiction of Niagara Falls—gravely disappointed American critics. With the exception of Tuckerman, who extolled Church’s originality, critics complained about the overly-done realism in Niagara.27 Niagara appeared to Jarves to depict nothing more than flowing water.28 A New York Times reviewer derided Church’s “hard and unsatisfactory” technical skill.29 Yet another reviewer, just plain tired of seeing the picture, felt it had only won an award based on its reputation in the United States rather than on its merit.30 Aside from Niagara, few other pictures attracted much critical notice. Instead, most American critics restricted their commentary to the fine arts section as a whole. Leslie, who had employed American artists for his weekly newspaper, wholly derided American art. His official report’s subheading, “The Fine Art Department Not Competitive,” summed up his assessment of the American art section.31 Leslie claimed that at least a third of the pictures were not even worthy of being there.32 He particularly scorned William Morris Hunt, groaning that his portraits and paintings “scarcely rose to the level of caricature in drawing, or the dignity of daub in color.”33 Leslie hardly favored any other American artists and

Paris’s Guiding Light

17

found them particularly deficient in figure and history painting—the strength of the French school—and with a few possible exceptions, even deficient in landscape.34 In other words, not even landscape painting, the pride of the American school, could compare with French painting. Jarves seconded Leslie’s negative assessment of the landscape painting as cold and inadequate. In his most biting comment, Jarves declared that the Universal Exposition “taught us a salutary lesson by placing the average American sculpture and painting in direct comparison with the European, thereby proving our actual mediocrity.”35 The ever-optimistic Tuckerman commended American artists, but he too openly admitted that American art suffered from serious educational and institutional obstacles not present in France.36 Few French critics reviewed the artworks, and those who did had little to say. Winslow Homer and Frederick Edwin Church were among the only artists praised, although the exhibition included works by prominent American artists.37 French critics limited their commentary to just a page at most in their otherwise extensive reviews.38 Leading French critic Paul Mantz introduced his unflattering commentary in the prestigious Gazette des Beaux-Arts with a description of the grim, poorly lit, and little visited American gallery.39 In general, the French critics opined that the American school lacked its own distinctive style and simply seemed to be an extension of the English school (deemed inferior to the French).40 The US gallery, located within the space occupied by the British gallery, made the comparison easier.41 French commissioner Eugene Rimmel asserted that the United States’ greatness lay in its vast open lands and numerous ports along the sea, noting only with condescension its “small but honourably filled” fine arts section.42 In other words, Rimmel felt that the young country did the best it could under the circumstances but would do better focusing on its land (not landscape painting) rather than on its arts. Unlike Rimmel, other French critics felt American artists had potential and that the United States would someday produce worthy artists.43 These critics, however, were thinking only of the future of American art; the present still proved woefully inadequate. Beyond Church’s Niagara, only three other paintings out of eighty-two entries—George Cochran Lambdin’s Last Sleep, Homer’s Prisoners from the Front, and Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. I: The White Girl—attracted any noteworthy attention from French critics. Théophile Gautier noted that Whistler’s painting had been exhibited at the Salon des refusés in 1863 but fondly recalled defending it.44 Prominent French critic Ernest Chesneau found

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The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

paintings by Homer, Johnson, and Lambdin at least deserving of mention, even though he found them conventional, and complimented Whistler.45 Encouraged by Chesneau’s scant attention, the New York Times translated and reprinted his sympathetic comments on Church, Bierstadt, and Whistler, undoubtedly to increase morale at home.46 Mantz favorably compared the precision of Homer’s brush in The Bright Side to that of Gérôme’s brushwork.47 Considering Gérôme’s elevated status in France, this was hearty praise. Théophile Thoré, who supported Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet, singled out Hunt’s portrait of Lincoln and Homer’s Prisoners from the Front for mild praise.48 Johnston, who owned Church’s Niagara and Homer’s Prisoners from the Front, could take some pride in owning the medal-winning picture and in the smattering of positive, if lukewarm, reviews.49 Until this exposition, American critics and collectors felt proud of their art, but it now seemed inferior and somewhat embarrassing.

French Art at the Universal Exposition Painfully aware of the US fine arts’ perceived artistic shortcomings, American critics closely examined the fair’s French school. A variety of technically advanced figure, genre, history, and landscape painting graced the French display. But as art historian Carol Troyen observed, while established American artists such as Winslow Homer seemingly remained unaffected by the negative criticism and neglect, US collectors and younger artists would react quickly to the criticism of American art in Paris.50 They turned toward the winners at the exposition, the French artists whose pictures and technique Tuckerman, Jarves, and other critics enthusiastically endorsed. American reviewers waxed poetic on the French pictures, particularly paintings by Gérôme and Meissonier. Just seeing Gérôme’s Duel after the Masquerade (Figure 2.1) in color rather than in a black-and-white print, according to a New York Tribune reviewer, made the expensive voyage to Paris worth the cost.51 Among the pictures Leslie most admired were Gérôme’s paintings, Phryne before the Aeropagus and Duel after the Masquerade; Meissonier’s pictures, 1814, The Campaign of France and Information: General Desaix with the Army of the Rhine and Moselle (Figure 2.2); and a few other pictures by artists such as Tony Robert-Fleury, Gustave Brion, Charles Jalabert, and Jules Breton.52 Leslie found their paintings “exquisite in every way, perfect in drawing, fine in color,

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Figure 2.1  Jean-Léon Gérôme, Duel after the Masquerade, 1857, reduction c. 1859, 15 3/8 × 22 3/16 in. (39.1 × 56.3 cm); The Walters Art Museum, art.thewalters.org. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD. Source: commons.wikimedia.org.

and most carefully manipulated” and declared that no artist could paint better than Meissonier.53 Meissonier’s ability to portray every detail of a scene on such small canvases amazed another reviewer, and Meissonier’s and Gérôme’s skillful draughtsmanship particularly fascinated him or her.54 In addition, he praised Cabanel’s portraits, “the best in contemporary art” and exclaimed that his treatment of the goddess in his Birth of Venus matched that of the revered old Venetian master, Titian.55 Comments such as this hark back to the Crayon’s advice to buy contemporary art, since some modern masters, in their opinion, painted as well as Old Masters. A critic for the popular journal, Harper’s New Monthly, lauded Gérôme as “the only French artist of both genius and culture” for his nudes, history, and genre pictures and also admired Edouard Frère.56 Critics’ reviews echoed the disparity between French and American art evident even in the exposition catalog. Only five sparse pages listed all the American artworks on exhibit, compared to forty-three dense pages for the French paintings alone. The next largest were Great Britain with eighteen pages of entries and Bavaria with fourteen. Entries listed American artists by their name, city of residence (most lived in New York), the title of the work, and the

20

The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

Figure 2.2  Ernest Meissonier, Information: General Desaix with the Army of the Rhine and Moselle, 1867, 11 7/8 × 17 in. (30.2 × 43.2 cm); Dallas Museum of Fine Art, Dallas, TX. Formerly William H. Vanderbilt collection. Source: commons.wikimedia.org.

name of the lender, as with most other countries. In contrast, French artists were listed by name, place of birth, and names of instructors followed by awards they had won and their current address. In addition, the listings included the year in which the painting had originally been exhibited in the Paris Salon, followed by the name of the lender. Awards were listed for artists from a few other countries, such as Great Britain and the Netherlands, but none of the lists were as long or detailed as for artists from France, whose sophisticated system of awards, its institutional capital, was more hierarchical and prestigious than that for other countries. One example makes the comparison between listings of French and American artists clear. William Morris Hunt’s entry read only “Hunt (W.-M.), from Boston,” which appeared insignificant in comparison to a distinguished, award-laden French artist such as Cabanel.57 The two entries below are worth quoting for what they reveal at a glance.

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Cabanel (Alexandre), né à Montpellier, élève de M. Picot. Prix de Rome 1845; méd. 2e cl., 1852; 1re cl., 1855; [Chevalier of the Legion of Honor] 1855; M. de l’Inst. [Member of the Institut de France], 1863; O [Officer of the Legion of Honor] 1864; gr. méd. d’hon., 1865.—Rue de la Rochefoucault, 17.58 Hunt (W. M.), à Boston (Massachusetts)59

Cabanel’s much longer entry recorded awards and honors not possible for an American artist to achieve since they lacked a comparable system of awards. Cabanel received the coveted prix de Rome in 1845, a second-class medal at the Salon of 1852, a first-class medal at the 1855 exposition, and the Cross of the Legion of Honor. In addition, he had become a member of the Académie des beaux-arts (one of the five bodies of the prestigious Institut de France) in 1863, was promoted to Officer of the Legion of Honor in 1864, and received a Grand Medal of Honor in the Salon of 1865. This long impressive list of honors lent enormous gravity to the artist and provided institutional legitimacy lacking in the United States. In sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, the symbolic production value of these paintings increased with each award.60 The American artists had none. They lacked the institutional recognition so well inculcated in the French fine arts. An established hierarchical system of competitions, or concours, culminated in the Grand Prix de Rome (Rome Prize) that allowed winners to study in Rome four or five years at the expense of the government. These competitions validated the artists and their work through awards. Masters (Gérôme, Cabanel, and Isidor Pils) led studios, called ateliers.61 Contemporaries viewed these men as dignified, learned, and highly skilled. Honors reinforced their status, and they were well known in art circles. In addition to lists of honors, the lenders’ names added panache to the French artists’ works. American visitors could not have failed to notice the illustrious kings, aristocrats, and museums who lent many of the French paintings. In the example above, Emperor Napoleon III owned three of Cabanel’s entries, Nymph Abducted by a Faun, Birth of Venus, and his portrait of the emperor, and the King of Bavaria owned Paradise Lost. Emperor Napoleon III lent Bouguereau’s Holy Family and Hugues Merle’s Primavera. The empress lent Rosa Bonheur’s Sheep by the Sea. The Luxembourg Museum, the prestigious public museum in Paris that exhibited works by contemporary living artists, lent Meissonier’s Emperor at Solferino, and Jules Breton’s Blessing of the Wheat in Artois and Calling in the Gleaners. Aristocrats lent four of Meissonier’s other pictures. The Marquess of

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The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

Hertford lent Toulmouche’s Forbidden Fruit. French art institutions lent other works, including Gérôme’s The Prisoner, from the Musée des beaux-arts in Nantes, and the Musée des beaux-arts in Bordeaux lent two of Bouguereau’s pictures and Vibert’s Narcissus.62 No American equivalent existed for these prominent aristocratic lenders and institutions. Hunt had no eminent lenders. No illustrious owners’ names punctuated the end of his individual entries. Hunt lent his own pictures, indicating that the pictures were still unsold and in the artist’s possession which meant that no individual or institution had validated them. However, with the exception of two works by other artists, American businessmen lent the majority of American art at the exposition.63 Embarrassed by the lack of public collections in the United States, Leslie regretfully noted that by comparison the French state contributed almost half of their entries.64 This only served to highlight the lack of government support for the arts in the United States. The 1867 exposition painting jury added to the list of French artists’ honors by amply rewarding them with medals.65 Whereas only one American artist won a medal, French artists obtained thirty-two medals, including four of the eight Grand Medals of Honor awarded to jury members Meissonier, Cabanel, Gérôme, and Théodore Rousseau.66 Grand Medals of Honor, the most prestigious recognition at the exposition, were also awarded to genre painter Ludwig Knaus (German) and history painter Baron Henri Leys (Belgian), both of whom became popular in the United States. Meissonier and Gérôme mainly exhibited genre pictures, Cabanel exhibited portraits and history paintings, and Rousseau exhibited landscapes.67 In addition, French painters, Eugène Fromentin, Jules Breton, Jean-François Millet, and Charles-François Daubigny, received first prizes. Rosa Bonheur, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and Jules Dupré won second prizes. Bouguereau won a third-class medal. Although he acknowledged favoritism on the part of the French jury, a New York Times reviewer declared that the French artists absolutely deserved the awards they received.68 The New York Tribune’s correspondent claimed that the “French school of painting is so far superior of all others, that not even rival patriotism questions it.”69 Leslie, who had derided his countrymen’s productions, echoed the sentiment. He wholeheartedly admired the French paintings in the Universal Exposition: “Gérôme had thirteen pictures, all highly dramatic and powerful; Bouguereau had ten; Meissonier fourteen, etc. Those thus honored were of course the leading artists of France, and the selections were made from their best works.”70

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Leslie and others praised French art, including Jarves, who unequivocally advocated French art as a model for American art.71 Jarves heartily admired the artists for their principles of teaching truth, beauty, and skill.72 He praised the technical skill that Meissonier, Gérôme, and Cabanel possessed and particularly admired Gérôme’s ability to recreate history on canvas through costume, architecture, and scenery.73 Gérôme’s technical finesse in his large contemporary history picture, Reception of the Siamese Ambassadors at Fontainebleau, drew Jarves’s praise.74 His promoting French art is all the more compelling considering that French contemporary art did not interest him (his primary passion was trecento and quattrocento Italian art), but as a critic he could not ignore it. Jarves considered their nudes unchaste and religious paintings depicted immorally but still considered them technically superior and worthy models and teachers for American artists.75

Conclusion Two lines of thought evolved from examination of French art at the 1867 exposition. With American artists’ inadequacies embarrassingly highlighted at the exposition and in the exposition catalog, French art quickly and nearly entirely displaced American art in the most important collections in the United States. The American Committee members collected American art before the exposition, and largely French and other European works after. This was a singular moment in American cultural history. For American collectors and critics alike, the Hudson River School paintings represented the art of the past, and French academic art the art of the present. Direct comparisons of the two countries’ art made differences evident at the exposition and spurred on change. The few American collectors who lent several of Gérôme’s paintings to the Universal Exposition found their works copiously awarded by French institutions.76 American critics bemoaned the United States’ inadequate arts and art training, and reviewers concurred that French art should serve as a model for American artists. American collectors learned which artists’ works to add to their collections. Dealers discovered which ones to supply to the collectors. French works would soon become readily available to American buyers. Bringing French works back to New York would provide access to paintings that Americans could learn from, aesthetically and pedagogically. Collectors owning works could enhance not only their own status but also the status of New York City and the United States through

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The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

this new objectified capital. The works’ subject matter would also provide a visual education for viewers. The “cultural education” American collectors and critics had just received from the exposition experience caused them to make changes.77 American artists were not incapable, as Henry James pointed out, but they lacked the necessary models and education, which Europe, particularly France, provided. After the exposition, even Henry T. Tuckerman strongly encouraged collectors to avail themselves of the dealers’ European wares. He claimed: “the most patriotic critic must admit that they [American collectors] often have ample reason for the preference [for European art], both as a matter of taste and as a judicious investment”—not only a financial but also a cultural investment.78 Although he considered himself “a patriotic critic,” Tuckerman championed European art as culturally and monetarily superior to American art. The combination of harsh words from American critics regarding American art, weak encouragement from major French critics, and lack of state support led American dealers and collectors to make drastic changes in the arts. The artists and dealers, the cultural producers and the intermediaries, provided the supply to meet the new demand for European art. They are the focus of the next chapter.

­3

“Paris Is for Sale” and Americans Are Buying One takes [. . .] an acute satisfaction in seeing America stretch out her long arm and rake in, across the green cloth of the wide Atlantic, the highest prizes of the game of civilization.1 —Henry James, 1876

Written just a few years after the Universal Exposition of 1867, James’s quotation from the New York Tribune reflects the pride he felt at “raking in” Europe’s fine art treasures. His novel, The American, published the same year, accurately reflects wealthy Americans’ picture-buying mood immediately following the exposition. Set in Paris when an influx of wealthy Americans set upon the foreign capital with verve and plenty of money, The American begins with San Francisco businessman Christopher Newman visiting the Louvre in May of 1868. He happens upon an attractive young Frenchwoman painting a copy after an Old Master picture. He buys it for 2,000 francs ($400). Having just made his first purchase, he realizes that “the prime throb of the mania of the ‘collector’” has just struck him.2 Then suddenly an old acquaintance, Tom Tristram, appears, and conversation about art buying ensues. Tristram aptly notes his friend is a Paris novice and inquires whether he has “come to buy Paris up? Paris is for sale, you know.”3 Tristram warns Newman, though, of the countless fake Old Master paintings. Thusly alerted, Newman still states his intention “to buy a great many pictures—beaucoup, beaucoup.”4 And buy they did, in The American and in real life. As with James’s novel, the budding interest in contemporary French art blossomed after the exposition. But rather than purchase copies of Old Master paintings by charming young Louvre copyists, Americans purchased works by prominent contemporary French and other European artists from the Paris Salon, from the dealers, and from the artists. This chapter explores the international art market network of the Gilded Age picture rush at its height during the 1870s and 1880s. A small network of reputable dealers made artworks readily available to collectors. The works included paintings by established and decorated Paris-based

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The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

artists such as Ernest Meissonier, Jean-Léon Gérôme, William Bouguereau, and Alexander Cabanel, whose works commanded some of the highest prices. After assembling collections from abroad, several key collections were soon sold at auction in New York. The press published prices and often buyers’ names. Results were closely watched and served as market barometers. Sensational prices— mainly for French paintings—offer evidence of the picture rush.

The Art Dealers: Gambart, Goupil, Knoedler, Avery, and Lucas A small group of art dealers laid the foundations for the Gilded Age picture rush in the 1850s and early 1860s and had gained a foothold in the New York market by 1867. Art historian Lois Fink rightly identified Adolphe Goupil and Ernest Gambart as trailblazing dealers.5 Adolphe Goupil and Henry Rittner founded a Paris gallery in 1829, known as Rittner & Goupil, and in 1848, Goupil opened a branch in New York City. German-born William Schaus went to New York in 1847 to run what was then called Vibert, Goupil, & Co. at 289 Broadway, across from A. T. Stewart’s Dry Goods Store. Another German immigrant, Michael Knoedler, followed in 1852.6 The French firm was called Goupil, Vibert & Co. until 1850, when Vibert passed away and the firm became Goupil & Co. On Goupil’s behalf, Schaus established the short-lived International Art-Union (1848–1851) meant to foster appreciation for European art on exhibition in its free gallery (although annual subscription to the union cost five dollars). Goupil & Co. mainly sold prints after paintings by contemporary French artists such as Ary Scheffer, Horace Vernet, Paul Delaroche, and American genre painters. William Schaus left Goupil & Co. and opened his own gallery in 1853. Michael Knoedler bought the New York branch from Goupil in 1857 and changed the name to M. Knoedler & Company, successors to Goupil & Co.7 It was popularly referred to as “Goupil” or “Goupil’s.” Knoedler sold American art but also dealt with contemporary French art before the 1867 exposition with some success.8 August Belmont, another German immigrant, was among his early clients, having purchased Meissonier’s Cavalier Awaiting an Audience ($9,600) and Bouguereau’s First Caresses ($2,900) both in November 1866.9 By 1867 Knoedler’s firm was well established in New York, but other than Belmont’s purchases, very few paintings in the stock books sold for over $1,000 or even $500. Michael Knoedler served alongside Samuel P. Avery on the 1867 Universal

“Paris Is for Sale” and Americans Are Buying

27

Exposition committee, and after the fair, Knoedler’s stock books reflect rising prices and increasing sales to Americans.10 Gambart, a dealer from London with no New York shop, brought European works into US cities via exhibitions in New York.11 In 1857, he organized exhibitions of Rosa Bonheur’s Horse Fair (Figure 3.1) in the United States, where it caused a sensation.12 Reflecting in 1894, John Durand, editor of the Crayon, credited this work with sparking an interest in European paintings in the United States, followed by Gérôme’s Duel after the Masquerade (Figure  2.1). William T. Walters purchased a reduction of the painting from the National Academy of Design exhibition in 1859.13 The original, exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1857, was purchased by the Duc d’Aumale. The Bonheur exhibit was the most extraordinary of the six US exhibitions of contemporary European art Gambart held between 1857 and 1867. American exhibition visitors responded favorably to its showings at the National Academy of Design, the Goupil gallery, and the Tenth Street Studio Building.14 The Crayon noted in 1860 that Gambart brought pictures by popular French artists such as Hugues Merle to the United States.15 Although Gambart’s travelling exhibitions to the United States ended the year of the 1867 exposition, other dealers were poised to continue aggressively promoting European art. Samuel P. Avery, who opened his gallery in 1864, became the most influential cultural broker in New York City. Baltimore businessman and collector William T. Walters helped Avery open his New York gallery and provided pictures for his

Figure 3.1  Rosa Bonheur, Horse Fair, 1852–1855, oil on canvas, 96 1/4 × 199 1/2 in. (244.5 × 506.7 cm), formerly Alexander T. Stewart collection. Gift of Cornelius Vanderbilt, 1887, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org.

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The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

first auction sale. A Southern sympathizer, Walters moved to Paris during the Civil War. Fellow Baltimorean George Lucas was already established in Paris. Among Avery’s early clients were collectors who would serve on the American committee for the 1867 exposition: Robert L. Stuart, Robert M. Olyphant, and John Taylor Johnston. Each man, including fellow art dealer Knoedler, bought minor European paintings from Avery, which helped establish his exclusive clientele. August Belmont also bought a painting from this 1864 sale. Avery’s catalog declared each artwork’s appeal: “Not one of which has ever been seen on this side of the Atlantic prior to the opening of this exhibition.”16 Although this 1864 sale was minor and the pictures not well known, it helped establish Avery’s network of buyers. As a native New Yorker rather than an immigrant, and the man in charge of the American fine arts at the 1867 exposition, Avery must have felt most keenly the embarrassment of the weak showing. However, he prepared for a change in his inventory prior to his travel abroad. Although he championed American art, Avery sold his own collection of American paintings and the contents of his library—books, furniture, and all—to provide funds to buy mostly French works during his European trip.17 He became particularly instrumental in effecting change in the arts after the exposition. As declared in an obituary, “He was appointed, in 1867, American Commissioner to the Paris World’s Fair, and returned to New York a picture dealer.”18 Avery relied on a network of dealers who introduced European art to the United States. Diaries, stock books, and some surviving letters attest to the successful international network these dealers established.19 Through Lucas, Avery, who did not yet speak French, met many of the European artists exhibiting in 1867, including Bouguereau and Cabanel among others.20 Avery took this opportunity to commission his first European works for American collectors such as John Taylor Johnston and William H. Vanderbilt.21 These purchases and commissions led to the two sales that jump-started his New York gallery a few months after the 1867 exposition. In a letter to Avery dated January 1868, Adolphe Goupil wrote that although Knoedler informed him that business had been slow, both Knoedler and Avery were hopeful that business would soon improve. Goupil warned Avery: “if you do not succeed it should be disgusting for all of us.”22 Business improved soon after. In April 1868, Avery held his first sale of his new purchases and used advertising and catalogs to communicate the paintings’ cultural value and artistic legitimacy to readers.23 His advertisement in the New York Times promoted Gérôme’s Death

“Paris Is for Sale” and Americans Are Buying

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of Caesar (Figure 3.2), Meissonier’s Reader from the 1867 Universal Exposition, and pictures by George Boughton and Paul Delaroche. In addition to those four, Avery included a long list of names headed by Jules Breton, Hugues Merle, Charles-François Jalabert, and Bouguereau. These prominent artists bestowed a sophisticated air to the sale. In addition, Avery touted his prestigious service as commissioner in the 1867 exposition and his return to his role as art agent.24 In spite of the poor reception of American art at the exposition, his work on behalf of the United States only enhanced his reputation. As one of New York’s leading dealers, his rapid change from an inventory of American art before the exposition to European art afterward indicated a changing direction in collecting. As with his newspaper advertisements, Avery’s catalog for this new sale featured his European acquisitions and changed significantly from those he published before the 1867 exposition.25 His new, lengthier catalogs appeared more elegant than his pre-exposition catalogs, and he printed them on a heavier, higher-quality paper, evidence of an interest in appealing to a wealthy clientele. Meissonier and Bouguereau topped the list of artists’ names on its cover page. Other French artists included Merle, Jalabert, Auguste Toulmouche, and the Dutch landscapist Barend Cornelis Koekkoek, artists whose work would become staples in US collections. Inside the catalog, the artists’ individual

­Figure 3.2  Jean-Léon Gérôme, Death of Caesar, 1859–1867, oil on canvas, 33 11/16 × 57 5/16 in. (85.5 × 145.5 cm), The Walters Art Museum, art.thewalters.org. Source: commons.wikimedia.org.

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The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

entries included their teachers, honors, and awards, as they had been listed in the catalog for the 1867 exposition. The European artists selected in this catalog received noticeably more honors and awards than had the artists from his 1864 sales catalog. An impressive two-page introduction lent refinement to the selection. Six quotations from various newspapers praised and validated the quality of the collection. The Home Journal mentioned Meissonier by name: Here are masterpieces by Meissonier and other eminent artists that would grace the most recherché gallery in the world. . . . The prices may seem high—four thousand gold, for instance, for a Meissonier that a man might cover with his two hands—still judged by any other rule than that of size of canvas, they are not excessive.26

This carefully worded quotation prepared the potential buyer for a costly but worthwhile investment. The size of Meissonier’s painting measured only about the size of the small sale catalog itself. Additionally, the French term “recherché” appealed to collectors’ desire to acquire the most exquisite art, lent an air of finesse, and recalled the recent Paris exhibition. Predictably, the sale topped the prices from Avery’s pre-exposition sales, which indicates the beginning of the Gilded Age picture rush. For example, Bouguereau’s Happy Mother sold for $1,000, and Fraternal Love, exhibited in the 1855 Paris Universal Exposition, sold for $1,500. A thousand dollars was considered an exorbitant sum for a painting in 1855.27 In 1868 it was the norm. By contrast, Avery received only $300 or less for most of the American paintings he sold before the 1867 exposition.28 A reviewer praised these new works Avery had assembled and concluded his or her review with an enthusiastic appeal to wealthy collectors to purchase and then exhibit these European works in order to educate the American artists and the public.29 Although there were other dealers in New York, such as Schaus, Cottier, and Reichardt, who sold European academic art, Goupil and Lucas in Paris  and Knoedler and Avery in New York were largely responsible for promoting and supplying the art. Goupil’s Paris picture shop served as a wholesale dealer for other dealers such as Knoedler, Lucas, Avery, and Schaus. Goupil’s in Paris sold actively to American dealers, particularly Knoedler, and less frequently to Avery, Lucas, and Schaus, as well as to some private individuals. Knoedler continued to refer to his gallery as Goupil. Henry T. Tuckerman, who had

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31

served on the 1867 exposition committee with Knoedler, credited Knoedler with the sale of expensive pictures: “during the past year, 1866–7, Goupil & Co. [M. Knoedler & Co.] disposed of pictures by such artists as Auchenbach [sic], Bouguereau, Frere [sic], Fichel, Gerome [sic], Meissonier, Merle, Troyon, Willems, etc., amounting in the aggregate to three thousand dollars.”30 A sale total of three thousand dollars would soon be eclipsed by six-figure totals during the Gilded Age picture rush. Knoedler, Avery, and Schaus continued their roles as leading New York dealers throughout the rush.31

The Artists: Leading French Academic Painters Dealers either commissioned paintings by academic artists for the American market or purchased them from the Paris Salons, international expositions, or directly from the artist. Avery’s and Lucas’s diaries are peppered with commissions and collaborations. Some artworks were purchased at auctions of well-known European aristocrats and capitalists and later from US collectors. By 1870, dealers and collectors began buying more paintings by academic artists and paying increasingly higher prices for them. This rapid increase in prices did not go unnoticed. Avery commented in 1872 that “prices asked for all kinds of painting are getting to be simply ridiculous.”32 Among the painters whose works garnered high prices were Grand Medal of Honor winners at the 1867 Universal Exposition: Gérôme, Meissonier, and Cabanel. Bouguereau received a third-class medal.33 They excelled at painting the human figure, and their works became staples in the most prominent collections for nearly three decades after the exposition. Examination of Goupil’s ledgers reveals that the 1870s was the strongest decade overall for sales of works by Bouguereau, Gérôme, Meissonier, and Cabanel which serve as high-end market barometers. Goupil’s contracts with Bouguereau and with Gérôme ensured lively sales of their works. Galerie Georges Petit handled many works by Meissonier, but because the gallery’s records are not extant, information must be gleaned from other sources, including Goupil. Goupil sold only thirty of Bouguereau’s works to Americans in the 1860s, but the firm sold eighty-one in the 1870s. The numbers of Gérôme’s works sold to Americans also increased substantially, from eighteen works in the 1860s to forty-six works in the 1870s.

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The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

Average sale prices from the time the four artists first appeared in the stock books through 1870 were about 9,200 francs ($1,840) for Gérôme’s works, 12,100 francs ($2,420) for Meissonier’s works, and 4,600 francs ($920) for Bouguereau’s works.34 These were close to the prices received at Avery’s 1868 sale. But these averages nearly doubled for paintings by Bouguereau and Gérôme from the 1860s to the 1870s and almost tripled for paintings by Meissonier in the same period. The average sale price for Bouguereau’s works in the stock books in the 1870s more than doubled from 4,600 francs ($920) to over 10,000 francs ($2,000). To get a sense of the value of these pictures, George A. Lucas paid his housekeeper 40 francs ($8) per month, and he paid about 800 francs ($160) per year for his Paris apartment.35 Although Goupil bought and sold fewer works by Gérôme than by Bouguereau in the 1870s, Gérôme’s average sale price in the stock books for this decade was about 20,000 francs ($4,000), about twice as high as Bouguereau’s prices. In comparison, the average for the few Cabanel paintings sold hovered around 10,000 francs ($2,000).36 Already well-established and honored in France, Gérôme, Meissonier, Cabanel, and Bouguereau produced works eagerly sought by eager collectors. The trusted, high-quality academic “brand” signified status, taste, and refinement. According to Tuckerman, American collectors, “men of wealth, observation, and travel, who aim at a collection of fine pictures,” had an eye on foreign art and noted that pictures by these artists had been imported for sale by Goupil & Co. in the United States since the planning stages of the exposition.37 Now their works would be sought after by more than a prescient few. A statement by Sir Purdon Clarke of the Metropolitan Museum of Art sums up the admiration for these four artists in hindsight: ­ id you notice that we do not see any forged Geromes, [sic] nor Cabanels, nor D Bouguereaus, nor Meissoniers? A man who could paint well enough to deceive an admirer of those men wouldn’t put their names to his canvases; he would sign them with his own name and reap the reward.38

In other words, these four artists’ skills were such that forgeries would only reflect on the great talent of the forger. Collecting works by these nearly inimitable artists avoided the problems earlier collectors experienced buying forgeries of Old Master paintings.39 A summary of the four artists’ status in France demonstrates why their works sold for high prices. Their works represented the institutional capital

“Paris Is for Sale” and Americans Are Buying

33

Americans desired. Meissonier, already considered a master in France, had been exhibiting in the Paris Salons since 1834, received the Grand Medal of Honor at the 1855 exposition and again in 1867. Meissonier was also promoted to Commander of the Legion of Honor in 1867.40 In addition to receiving Salon medals, Cabanel, Gérôme, and Meissonier were elected members of the esteemed Académie des beaux-arts, the Institut de France, by 1867. Gérôme was elevated to Officer of the Legion of Honor in 1867. Bouguereau, who won the Prix de Rome in 1850, was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1859. Cabanel’s many awards were already listed in the previous chapter. Although there is still no such equivalent today, these prestigious honors could be akin to an artist today receiving recognition from multiple sources such as a MacArthur Fellowship, a Rome Prize, and a National Medal of Arts. As the products of an established government-run system of exhibitions, art schools, and awards, Bouguereau, Cabanel, Gérôme, and Meissonier represented to Americans what the culturally underdeveloped United States lacked. The works of artists who received awards from the Paris Salon were more valuable, both financially and culturally, in the eyes of US collectors. No comparably prestigious, internationally recognized system was in place in the United States to award such distinctions to American artists. The relatively young National Academy of Design in New York did award its students, but it was less hierarchical than the French system and lacked international prestige. No American equivalent existed for the highest prize, the Grand Prix de Rome. The US government would never fund such annual travel. Additionally, the youthful National Academy had a local rather than international reputation as did the centuries-old academies in Paris, London, and Rome. Each of these French artists had works hung in public venues in Paris where visitors could view them.41 In 1867, all but Gérôme had paintings on view at the Luxembourg Museum, the only contemporary art museum that displayed works by living artists. American visitors to the fine arts at the Universal Exposition likely also visited the Luxembourg Museum. The lofty history paintings on view included Bouguereau’s two large pictures, Triumph of the Martyr and Philomela and Procne, Meissonier’s Emperor at Solferino and Napoleon III Surrounded by His General Staff, and Cabanel’s Glorification of St. Louis. Ten years after an artist’s death, his or her work would transfer to the Louvre. No such equivalent institutions existed in the United States. New York City at this time had only the New-York Historical Society, which mainly owned portraits.

34

The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

In addition to their many institutional awards and well-displayed artworks, Cabanel and Gérôme had also been professors at the premier art school in France, the École des beaux-arts in Paris, since its curriculum was reorganized in 1863. This reorganization resulted in the creation of three ateliers led by Gérôme, Cabanel, and Isidore Pils and in the admittance of foreign students.42 On the cusp of the 1867 exposition, a handful of American students had already enrolled in Gérôme’s and Cabanel’s studios. Numerous American artists studied in Paris in the 1870s and 1880s.43 As the French artists’ renown increased in the United States, so did the prices for their works. In the 1880s, Knoedler’s sales of academic art peaked and remained high. Michael Knoedler died in 1878, leaving his son Roland at the helm. Knoedler sold ninety-three works at $5,000 or over between 1881 and 1885, with Meissonier’s Philosopher the top seller on the books at $20,000 sold to Mary Jane Morgan. The highest grossing painting by Gérôme sold for $13,500, by Cabanel for $10,600, and by Bouguereau for $8,000.44 Between 1885 and 1892 the number of paintings sold at or over $5,000 dropped to thirtyeight, but the high prices for academic work remained relatively steady. Among the highest prices in Knoedler’s stock books (1885–1892) were paintings by Meissonier, Gérôme, and Bouguereau at $16,500, $15,000, and $13,500, respectively.45 Knoedler was still the major buyer of Gérôme’s and Bouguereau’s works from Goupil, although he bought somewhat less frequently by the end of the 1880s. Most of Avery’s entries regarding Gérôme and Meissonier involved the purchase of works from Goupil, except for Meissonier’s portrait of William H. Vanderbilt. Avery and Lucas worked together with Meissonier and Vanderbilt, who paid the artist 25,000 francs ($5,000).46 Lucas arranged the commission for the portrait, and he and Avery accompanied Vanderbilt to Meissonier’s studio.47 Vanderbilt sat for twelve sittings. Avery, often accompanied by Lucas, worked with various other dealers sporadically, such as Georges Petit, Charles Sedelmeyer, and the Lallon Brothers in Paris, McLean’s Gallery, Agnew’s, and P.L. Everard & Co. in London, Delehaye in Antwerp and The Hague, and Fleischmann’s in Munich.48 Lucas maintained his strong relationships with Bouguereau and Cabanel into the 1880s. As he had in the 1870s, Lucas continued to commission from Cabanel single female figures such as Desdemona, Flora, Hebe, Psyche, Rebecca, and Rachel.49 Lucas still usually paid 10,000 francs ($2,000) for each of these types of pictures.50 He also arranged to have several portraits

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35

of Americans painted by Cabanel in the 1880s; these typically cost 20,000 francs ($4,000).51 Goupil, Lucas, Knoedler, and Avery steadily continued to sell pictures into the 1880s. Avery retired in 1885 at age sixty-three, but his son Sam, Jr., continued the business. Lucas stayed in business nearly until his death in 1909.

New York Blockbuster Auctions: The 1870s and 1880s The Gilded Age picture rush reached its peak in the late 1870s and 1880s as evidenced in stock books and in auction records. Artworks changed hands more often as collections built in the 1870s were dismantled in the 1880s and resold. Auctions served as a primary venue for acquisitions. Ripley Hitchcock wrote in The Art Review in 1887 that the “best collections of to-day are heavily indebted to auction sales, from that of the John Wolfe collection in 1862 [sic] down to that of Mrs. [Mary Jane] Morgan’s collection last year.”52 Some key collectors, such as businessmen John Wolfe and George Seney, like Johnston, sold collections due to financial reversals of fortunes, but unlike Johnston, they also appeared to buy and sell to make a profit. Thus, when these collections sold at auction, collectors paid close attention. Johnston eventually bought more paintings but did not rebuild another stellar collection, whereas Wolfe and Seney each amassed and sold two collections. Their third collections were both sold at auction posthumously in the same year, 1894.53 The key dealers actively participated in the auctions in addition to running their galleries. In the 1870s Belmont, Johnston, Catharine Wolfe, C. P. Huntington, A. T. Stewart, and W. H. Vanderbilt were among the most notable collectors. A notice in the American estimated that New York’s private art galleries cost owners “at least six and a half million dollars. Mr. W. H. Vanderbilt heads the list with one million dollars, followed by Mrs. A. T. [Cornelia] Stewart, five hundred thousand dollars; Miss Catherine [sic] L. Wolfe, four hundred and fifty thousand; August Belmont, three hundred and fifty thousand. These galleries are filled almost entirely with the works of foreign artists.”54 Whether the figures were accurate or not, the perception that the pictures cost enormous sums of money persisted. Avery wrote a brief assessment of the art market between 1868 and 1883. He provided sales figures for the most prominent sales and noted that “[i]t frequently happens that paintings by such celebrated artists as Meissonier, Rousseau, Troyon, Millet, Decamps, Gérôme, Bouguereau, Knaus, Rosa Bonheur, Diaz,

36

The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

Munkacsy, Fortuny, etc., are sold at prices ranging from one thousand to fifty thousand dollars.” He continued, “These statistics show how important the art interest has become.” He considered the W. H. Vanderbilt collection to be worth over a million dollars.55 However, Vanderbilt never sold his collection en masse, and no inventory of his purchase prices is extant so whether its value increased is conjectural. Therefore, I turn to auction records for several key sales. Collections formed rapidly through this busy network of dealers and those same dealers helped sell the collections. August Belmont began collecting in the late 1850s, primarily through fellow German immigrant, Michael Knoedler. Belmont lived in New York and served as American agent of the Rothschild banking family of Europe. He soon became one of the United States’ wealthiest citizens and became involved in the arts. He served on the board of directors of the 1853 New York Crystal Palace Exhibition, a small international exhibition inspired by London’s Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851.56 Then from 1855 to 1857, Belmont served as United States Minister to the Netherlands and soon began forming an art collection. In November 1872, Belmont sold seventy-nine works, a portion of his collection, prior to his departure for Europe. A New York Times reviewer prefaced his/her comments on the collection by noting that “Mr. Belmont has always borne the reputation of possessing a cultured taste.”57 Among the twentyeight French paintings were Rosa Bonheur’s Return from Pasture, Gérôme’s Diogenes, Meissonier’s Cavalier Awaiting an Audience, Merle’s Christian Maiden, and Bouguereau’s Italian Mother and Child.58 The average price per painting of the French pictures averaged $1,369. The average price per picture increased dramatically a few years later at the Johnston sale. French paintings on average sold for $1,000 more than at Belmont’s sale. Avery and especially Lucas worked with John Taylor Johnston, president of the Lehigh, Susquehanna, and Central New Jersey railroads, to form his collection, which he unfortunately could not enjoy for long.59 Adversely affected by the general economic downturn that occurred between 1873 and 1878, his railroads faced financial doom. As a result, he sold his collection in 1876, soon after he formed it. Johnston’s pictures went on exhibit at the National Academy of Design three weeks prior to the sale. The entire collection hung at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of the Centennial Loan Exhibition about six months prior to the sale. Turner’s Slave Ship, which Johnston purchased from John Ruskin, hung in the main hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where it remained on extended loan until its sale. The sale was highly publicized and well

“Paris Is for Sale” and Americans Are Buying

37

attended by other dealers and collectors, with dealers often purchasing on behalf of prominent collectors. Avery directed the Johnston sale and wrote the notice in the catalog, praising the collection as one of the best, “if not the finest, most varied, and complete collection ever brought together on this continent,” and expressed regret at its dispersal.60 Johnston had owned his European works for less than a decade.61 Works with sterling provenances included Gérôme’s Death of Caesar (Figure 3.2), purchased at the 1867 exposition, and Meissonier’s Soldier at Cards, originally in the well-known collection of the Russian aristocrat, Prince Anatole Demidoff.62 Twelve pictures by French artists were among the sixteen pictures in the sale that sold for over $5,000 each.63 Johnston’s collection of 323 lots brought a total $328,286. The highest prices in descending order were Church’s 1867 exposition medal winner, Niagara Falls, $12,500; Meissonier’s Soldier at Cards, $11,500; Turner’s Slave Ship, $10,000; Troyon’s Autumn Morning, Landscape and Cattle, $9,700; Meissonier’s Marshal Saxe and Staff, $8,600; Decamps’ The Turkish Patrol, Smyrna, $8,350; Charles Müller’s Scene at the Conciergerie Prison during the Roll Call of the Last Victims of the Reign of Terror, 9th Thermidor, 1793, $8,200; and Gérôme’s Death of Caesar, $8,000. Johnston owned about an equal number of American and French paintings: seventy-four American paintings and seventy French paintings. The average price for an American painting was $724 but the average for the French paintings was $2,339. A reviewer remarked after the sale that Johnston’s “collection was the largest and most valuable ever sold in the United States.”64 These high prices, garnered during a recession which caused Johnston to sell, indicated to collectors of contemporary European works that these artists’ pictures were among the soundest financial and cultural investments.65 Johnston’s collection set a new standard. But the prices would climb higher in the 1880s. The high-profile sales of the Mary Jane Morgan collection in 1886 followed by the A. T. Stewart sale in 1887 indicate the peak of the market.66 Both the Morgan and Stewart sales were heavily advertised blockbusters. Both collections were of high quality. The primary difference was the speed and secrecy with which Morgan assembled her collection. A New York Times reviewer believed that the Morgan collection would have formed a better museum collection than that of the late William Henry Vanderbilt. Meissonier’s Standard Bearer was a “superb example of the master,” and Bouguereau’s large painting of the Virgin compares to the Madonnas of the

38

The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

great Italians.67 An enthusiastic French review of the Morgan sale by Thomas Eudel appeared in the Art Amateur. He concluded that “[i]n spite of the thirty percent duty, the Americans will long have need of us [the French] to ornament their galleries.”68 The Art Journal called the Morgan sale “one of the most important of recent times, and interesting as giving some indication of the effect of the prohibitive tariff.”69 Billed as “the greatest art sale ever held in this country” Morgan’s rapidly acquired 232 oil paintings (240 including seven watercolors and a pastel) brought a total of $870,900.70 Jules Breton’s Communicants brought the highest price at an astonishing $45,500, which was $30,000 more than the Johnston collection’s highest price. Henner’s La Source (Figure 3.3) sold for $10,100, and Vibert’s The Missionary’s Adventures (Figure  3.4) sold to Collis P. Huntington for $25,500. Compared to the Johnston sale, which had sixteen pictures sell for over $5,000, the Morgan sale had forty-five pictures sell for over $5,000. Recall that Knoedler sold ninety-three works at $5,000 or higher in a four-year span (1881–1885— twenty-two of them to Mary Jane Morgan), whereas half that number were sold in just one sale.71 One hundred forty-five of Morgan’s pictures were French, with an average sale price of $4,512 per French picture, nearly double the average price of Johnston’s French pictures. In contrast, the eight American pictures in her collection averaged $978 per picture. A. T. Stewart’s 1887 collection sale brought some sensational prices, but less overall than the Morgan sale. The Stewart collection was dispersed at auction after his childless widow’s death in 1887. Stewart built a special gallery (Figure  3.5) at the rear of his mansion on the northwest corner of ThirtyFourth Street and Fifth Avenue, across from where the Empire State Building now stands. However, he rarely allowed outside visitors beyond his circle of friends, including fellow collectors August Belmont, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and William B. Astor. Nevertheless, the collection’s significance was wellknown through reproductions and press accounts. Influential art critic James Jackson Jarves reported a rumor that Stewart would give his collection to New York City as a gift.72 But rather than leave his collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or to form a separate gallery at his death in 1876, Stewart left his collection to his wife, Cornelia. After her death ten years later, newspaper accounts also speculated that she intended to give it to the museum, but instead it was sold.73 Stewart’s best-known pictures were Rosa Bonheur’s Horse Fair (Figure. 3.1), brought to the United States by Gambart, and Meissonier’s 1807, Friedland

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Figure 3.3  Jean-Jacques Henner, The Source, 1881, oil on canvas, 35 × 27 in. (88.9 × 68.6 cm), formerly Mary Jane Morgan collection. Source: Image courtesy of Richard Taylor Fine Art.

(Figure  3.6).74 The two pictures anchored his gallery (Figure  3.5). Meissonier wrote to Stewart: Permit me to believe that when you are looking at this picture—on which I have bestowed all the science and experience I have been able to acquire in my art— your pleasure will constantly grow greater. I have the conviction [. . .] that the value of this work will increase with time. What may or can be said of it will pass away, but the picture will remain, to be an honor to both of us.75

40

The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

Figure 3.4  Jehan-Georges Vibert, The Missionary’s Adventures, c. 1883, Oil on wood, 39 × 53 in. (99.1 × 134.6 cm), formerly Mary Jane Morgan collection, Bequest of Collis P. Huntington, 1900, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org.

Meissonier referred to its long-lasting cultural value. Meissonier’s prediction proved true. 1807, Friedland hangs prominently today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It made headlines when Stewart bought it for $60,000 from the artist in 1876, the year of the Johnston sale. It sold for $66,000 at his sale and was promptly donated to the museum.76 Bonheur’s Horse Fair sold for $53,000 and was also donated to the museum.77 Many of the pictures, however, were sold at a loss, and overall, the Art Amateur interpreted the results as disappointing.78 The 217 pictures brought $513,750. Stewart’s seventy-six French pictures averaged $3,884, a 14 percent decrease in average from the Morgan sale. In contrast, the average for his twenty-four American pictures increased from the Morgan sale by 58 percent, from Morgan’s average of $978 to $1,544. Twenty-two of Stewart’s 217 paintings sold above $5,000. At the blockbuster Johnston sale eleven years earlier, few pictures sold for over $5,000. Such prices were considered outstanding at these earlier sales, whereas at the Stewart sale they were still high but declined somewhat. The market had reached a plateau and high prices paid would not necessarily see a further rise at auction. By the

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Figure 3.5  Alexander T. Stewart’s Picture Gallery at 1 West 34th Street, c. 1880. Source: George W. Sheldon Artistic Houses (New York: Appleton & Co., 1883–1884), vol. 1, n.p.

early 1890s, another depression hindered the economy. The following chart (Table 3.1) gives these figures at a glance.79 Looking at Table 3.1, prices for French paintings at the Johnston sale increased dramatically from Belmont’s sale. Morgan’s sale prices more than doubled since the Johnston sale ten years prior. However, the average price per picture dropped in just a year between the Morgan and Stewart sales, indicating that prices had begun to fall. However, as prices for French paintings fell, prices for American paintings rose. What could account for this change? Did Stewart have

42

The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

Figure 3.6  Ernest Meissonier, 1807, Friedland, c. 1861–1875, oil on canvas. 53 1/2 × 95 1/2 in. (135.9 × 242.6 cm), formerly Alexander T. Stewart collection. Gift of Henry Hilton, 1887, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org. Table 3.1  Auction Results 1872–1887, with average sale prices of French and American paintings. Year of auction

Collector

French paintings

American paintings

1872

Belmont80

$1,369

$520

1876

Johnston

$2,339

$724

1886

Morgan

$4,571

$978

1887

Stewart

$3,884

$1,544

Source: Author.

better-quality American paintings and lower-quality French paintings? Were American paintings becoming more popular? Table 3.2 offers a different view. It includes sales before and after the peak (the Universal Expositions of 1867 and 1893) by prominent investment collectors, John Wolfe and George I. Seney.81 Their sales prices were strong but considerably lower. The depression that coincided with the World’s Columbian Exposition affected sales. Prices both before and after the two expositions were considerably lower than during the peak of the Gilded Age picture rush. Wolfe’s small posthumous 1894 sale (48 lots) nearly equaled his pre-exposition 1863 sale for French

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Table 3.2  Auction Results 1863–1894, with average sale prices of French and American paintings. Year of auction

Collector

1863

Wolfe, J.

$940

$368

1872

Belmont

$1,369

$520

1876

Johnston

$2,339

$724

1882

Wolfe, J.

$1,309

NA

1885

Seney

$1,710

$667

82

French paintings

American paintings

1886

Morgan

$4,571

$978

1887

Stewart

$3,884

$1,544

1891

Seney83

$2,905

$799

1894

Wolfe, J.

$935

NA

1894

Seney

$899

$448

Source: Author.

paintings; however, there were no blue-chip names (i.e. Bouguereau, Gérôme, Meissonier, Vibert, Schreyer, Diaz, Millet) to bring up the averages. More informative is George I. Seney’s large 1894 posthumous sale (315 lots), which included blue chip names (Diaz, Daubigny, Rousseau, Troyon, Knaus, although no Bouguereau, Gérôme, Meissonier). Seney, who had largely collected French academic art a decade earlier, added ninety-one American paintings to his collection, which signaled growing interest in American art despite the poor economy. Prices for American paintings immediately following the World’s Columbian Exposition were still comparatively low, despite the critical hope and zeal generated by the fair.84 Seney’s diversified collection indicated an increasing interest in different artistic styles by prominent investment collectors, yet prices had not caught up.85 Only 12  percent of the pictures sold for at least $1,000, well below the averages of the 1870s and 1880s. Although critics praised works by George Inness and Winslow Homer, their paintings sold for mediocre prices. Seven of Inness’ paintings sold respectably between $1,000 and $3,050, but the other six sold for less than $650, the cost of prints after Meissonier’s painting, A Brawl. Homer’s painting sold for less than $1,000.86 However, the average price for American paintings at Seney’s sale was $448, placing the prices for the Inness and Homer paintings above prices for their American peers. Ludwig Knaus’s

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The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

Coffee-House brought the highest price, $8,200. Seven paintings by American artist George Inness sold for at least $1,000. His works were among the costliest, although most of the highest prices were paid for French Barbizon paintings by Diaz, Daubigny, Rousseau, and Troyon. Seney’s 1894 collection even included two landscapes by Claude Monet, which sold for $775 and $1,300, and two by Gustave Courbet. However, Seney’s sale overall, held shortly after the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, indicated a return to the lower prices prior to the 1867 Universal Exposition.

The Market Slows Down: The Early 1890s Why the slow-down by the early 1890s? There are several explanations. In an effort to stem the flow of European art into the United States, the tariff on foreign art rose from 10 to 30 percent in 1883.87 The tariff achieved some success as the value of foreign art imports promptly dropped from $3 million to $637,000 that year.88 However, the New York auction sales allowed buyers to avoid the tariff on imported works as paintings changed owners on this side of the Atlantic, but buying from artists and dealers abroad continued. Both American and European artists favored abolishing the tariff. The New York Times published Gérôme’s tirade against the tariff in 1884, in which he called attention to the free education American art students enjoyed in France. Collector Henry Marquand urged a repeal in light of the educational nature of art, a point reiterated three years later by Harper’s Weekly: taxing art was akin to taxing education.89 Despite hearty protests, the tariff remained at 30  percent until 1891 when the government lowered it to 15 percent. But soon after, the Panic of 1893 and the subsequent depression affected sales. Unemployment soared.90 The tariff reduction did not help during a depression. European artists’ works received their highest prices in the first half of the decade, prior to the tariff increase and economic downturn. The majority of artworks by any artist in the Goupil and Knoedler books sold for less than $6,000 each, but occasionally a popular or outstanding painting would exceed this amount. Buying activity by Avery slowed as well but cannot be accurately assessed beyond 1882, the year of his last visit to Paris and the end of his diary entries.91 The tariff likely discouraged him from further buying trips. He retired soon after, and his son Sam continued the business but not with the same gusto

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45

as his father. Similarly, Michael Knoedler’s son took over after his father’s death in 1878. Adolphe Goupil, Gérôme’s father-in-law, retired in 1884 and died in 1893, but the firm continued. Additionally, the leading quartet of academic artists were in their sixties by the mid-1880s. In 1885, Bouguereau was sixty, Gérôme sixty-one, Cabanel sixty-two, and Meissonier seventy. Gérôme’s solid family and business relationship with Goupil & Co. ensured continued promotion of his work; however, his popularity with American buyers began to wane by the end of the decade, when the artist was in his mid-sixties. Americans bought slightly fewer works by Gérôme from Goupil in the 1880s than they had in the 1870s: forty-six in the 1870s versus thirty-four in the 1880s. Likewise, Goupil sold half as many Bouguereau paintings in the 1880s as he had in the previous decade, forty-three as compared to eighty-one. Goupil sold only three of Meissonier’s works in the 1880s, and none by Cabanel, who passed away in 1889. Meissonier died in 1891.

Conclusion As a Studio correspondent noted in 1883, the year of the tariff increase, Americans relied on Paris for cultural guidance: “the eyes of the world still turn to Paris for its standard of taste, and look to its Salon as, in a certain sense, the stock market of art.”92 Although the French held cultural power, the Americans had buying power. Writing at the height of the market in his 1886 introduction to Impressions on Painting, Belgian artist Alfred Stevens addressed the financial, rather than cultural value of the work. He flatly stated that “[i]t is America that regulates prices in the European picture market.”93 Americans acquired Stevens’s pictures, giving him first-hand market experience, and his brother, Arthur Stevens, was a prominent dealer in Paris (mainly selling Barbizon paintings). His perspective on the European art market is evidence of the heavy handprint left by American collectors and dealers on the international art market. American buyers and dealers greatly impacted the international market in a way they had never done before the Civil War. Avery, Lucas, Goupil, and Knoedler served as primary liaisons between Paris and New York. Largely with the aid of these and other dealers, major collections of European art, mainly

46

The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

French, were rapidly formed in the United States. Contemporary European art was almost exclusively experienced in an art market context—the world of dealers, collectors, and auctions. American collectors’ ravenous appetites for French pictures attracted attention abroad. Émile Durand-Gréville, a French critic, traveled to New York, Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, and reported on French paintings in the United States. He reasoned that “while the standard of art is higher in France than in America, what better means could Americans employ to elevate their taste than to lavish their money upon French art works?”94 Status alone, name recognition, and cost formed only part of the Gilded Age picture rush. Through emulating and possessing France’s fine arts, United States’ art and culture could progress and shed its provincial veneer. American industrialists, financiers, and merchants converted their wealth, or economic capital, into cultural capital.95 Pioneering collector August Belmont had long before Durand-Gréville’s visit stated his intention to “help improve the taste of our New York people for the fine arts.”96 Initially, this conversion was nothing more than what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu termed “cultural goodwill,” a desire for knowledge and refined taste yet still lacking both.97 Similarly, Henry James’s character, Christopher Newman, admitted his lack of cultivation and education, yet he determined to learn about art and history while in Europe. Newman represented the real-life eager-to-learn collectors as Bourdieu described and on which James based his protagonist. The collectors traveled abroad; visited museums, private collections, and artists’ studios; and relied on sound advice from dealers. Pictures were also viewed as essential educational tools. In large part, regardless of the art market’s vicissitudes, the collectors who bought to keep rather than to sell made an investment in education. As August Belmont wrote, a “good picture cannot be exhibited without doing good, both in an artistic and moral point of view.”98 The next chapter examines the collecting trends, particularly in subject matter, among seven exemplary collections (those of John Taylor Johnston, August Belmont, Collis P. Huntington, A. T. Stewart, William H. Vanderbilt, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, and Mary Jane Morgan) and the upper class, gendered, white ideologies they espoused.

­4

Purchasing Ideologies: Seven New York Collections An adequate account of pictures in modern galleries would be a comment on the ideas, the tastes, the sentiments, the manners and customs, of the men and women of our epoch.1 —Eugene Benson, 1870

Artist Eugene Benson made this remark in assessing the John Taylor Johnston collection in 1870. His remark refers to upper class, white, and largely male ideas. This chapter addresses Benson’s observation by examining the collecting trends of seven key New York collections of the height of the Gilded Age picture rush. These are the John Taylor Johnston, August Belmont, Collis P. Huntington, A. T. Stewart, William H. Vanderbilt, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, and Mary Jane Morgan collections. Johnston, Belmont, and Stewart were active in the 1870s. Stewart died in 1876, and his widow, Cornelia, inherited the collection. It was then referred to as the Mrs. A. T. Stewart collection until her death in 1886. The collection was sold in 1887. The other three, Vanderbilt, Morgan, and Wolfe, died in the 1880s. Vanderbilt and Morgan both died in 1886. Wolfe died the following year. Huntington’s collecting spanned several decades until his death in 1900. A close analysis of these collections reveals collecting trends in subject matter depicting aspirational ideals rather than reality. Salon paintings’ moralizing, sentimental content created what social psychologist Jonathan E. Schroeder termed a “symbolic environment” in collectors’ homes.2 Each collection became its own symbolic environment, a pictorial environment reflecting gender, race, and class ideals. Painted subjects reinforced binary gender roles and a class-based society with every person in his or her place. Visions of bourgeois elegance, close-knit families, contented peasants, and charming children provided a sense of order, harmony, comfort, and refinement for the white upper class.

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The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

Having worked with the same dealers and purchased work from many of the same artists, the men’s and women’s collections bear similar aspirational content. Although Morgan and Wolfe relied on male advisors, critics credited them with some agency in forming their own collections. The two women lived two blocks apart in their Madison Square homes, but it is not known if they met.3 Wolfe never married and thus presumably made the collecting decisions herself. Morgan, a childless widow, rapidly built her collection in relative secrecy after her husband’s death. These two women’s collections were clearly identified with them. Charles de Kay, an art critic for the New York Times, wrote in the Magazine of Art that Morgan “had the good sense to choose capable advisers, and presently showed that she had taste of her own.”4 In The Sun, Morgan’s lavish spending on art at first caused “suspicion upon the condition of her mind.” But the author then expressed surprise at the collection’s merit and ascertained that “as a whole, it was informed with such good taste and such high quality.”5 Montague Marks, writing in the Art Amateur, infantilized the collector by stating that she played “with her precious toys” and alluded to dealers taking advantage of her by asking high prices that she would “bargain” down to the price the dealers expected her to pay.6 Despite these gendered and biased assessments, the quality of her collection was undisputed.7 One New York Times author commented that her collection surpassed that of William Henry Vanderbilt and would have formed a better museum collection.8 Catharine Wolfe’s cousin, John Wolfe, himself a collector, was often credited with assisting her in her purchases. As if to validate her collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Handbook credited John Wolfe with providing advice on her purchases.9 This assertion was repeated in the 1894 sale of his collection.10 She also purchased some works that had once been in his collection, such as Thomas Couture’s Soap Bubbles. In her dissertation, Margaret Laster noted that the Wolfe cousins’ collections both included 90 of the same artists (out of 109 for Catharine Wolfe’s collection).11 Unlike her cousin, she kept her collection, whereas John Wolfe bought and sold two collections; the third was sold posthumously.12 The extent to which her cousin assisted her cannot be fully ascertained, though the overlap in the two collections makes a compelling case for receiving shared advice. Genre paintings, scenes of everyday life past or present, comprised about half of all the collections (see Table 4.1), whether collected by men or by women.13 Landscape and marine scenes comprised the second largest category, at 12 to 20 percent of the collections. Animal, Orientalist, and religious scenes were the

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Table 4.1  Collections with collector’s name, year of inventory list, twelve categories of works in alphabetical order, and percentages of those works within each collection. Johnston Belmont Huntington Morgan Vanderbilt Wolfe Stewart 1876 (%) 1879 (%) 1879 (%) 1886 (%) 1886 (%) 1887 (%) 1887 (%) Animal Cityscape Genre History Landscape

6

11

3

9

9

8

6

1

3

0

0

0

2

1

35

44

62

53

51

45

55

6

6

0

0

3

0

7

30

20

14

15

12

13

13

Literary

3

1

0

1

2

1

6

Military

3

5

1

3

5

6

2

Mythology

1

1

1

1

0

0

0

Orientalist

4

3

7

7

11

9

3

Portrait

5

0

0

0

2

1

1

Religious

6

3

10

9

2

9

2

Still life

2

3

3

1

1

4

3

Source: author.

next most popular categories, although these comprised fewer than 12 percent each in the seven collections.14 Historical and literary scenes and military subjects followed behind.15 All of these pictures reflect the interest in narratives. Few collections included portraits, and there were small numbers of still lifes, cityscapes, and mythological or allegorical themes. After the American Civil War, visions of social harmony among the classes and races reflected a desire for peaceful coexistence in turbulent times. Adolphe Yvon’s Genius of America (Figure  4.1) in the Alexander T. Stewart collection summarizes this vision of harmony. It was also one of the few paintings that referenced contemporary political events and featured people of color. This huge mural referred to the American Civil War, slavery, immigrants, and indigenous people in a complex, multi-figure allegory that proclaimed the United States’ greatness. Yvon’s massive Genius of America, also known as Triumph of America (originally titled United States of America, or March of the American Republic), proclaimed that it had already achieved it in this vision of a unified United States. Stewart, the rags-to-riches Irish immigrant, commissioned the French artist, Yvon, known for his Napoleonic paintings, to execute a small Genius of America (35 3/4 × 59 inches) in 1858, just a few years prior to the US Civil

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The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

Figure 4.1  Adolphe Yvon, Genius of America, 1870, oil on canvas, 29 1/2 feet × 18 feet (899.2 × 548.6 cm), Chancellor’s Hall, New York State Education Building, Albany, NY, formerly Alexander T. Stewart collection. Source: commons.wikimedia.org.

War.16 Yvon  conceived the composition, but presumably Stewart agreed with the French artist’s representation of the different groups of people. Then around the time of the 1867 Universal Exposition, after the war, Stewart commissioned a mural-size version (29.5 feet × 18 feet) with no visible changes.17 Genius of America reportedly created a sensation when it was exhibited in Paris in 1870 before making its way across the Atlantic that year.18 However, Stewart could not fit this exceedingly large painting in his Fifth Avenue mansion’s gallery, so he sent it to his hotel, the Grand Union Hotel, in posh Saratoga Springs, New York, where it hung in the ballroom from 1876, the Centennial year, until the hotel’s demolition in 1952.19 This painting, a visual summary of United States history and ideologies, celebrated the country’s reconciliation and unity as well as the nation’s prosperity, knowledge, and civilization of people of color. Past, present, peace, labor, and abolition are all represented. Heralds above the allegorical figures representing thirty-four states proclaim the glory of the United States.20 A statue of George Washington presides below, standing as a proud symbol of the new nation as its first president. Its ambitious and proud visual proclamation of American glory induced “a feeling of patriotism” in viewers.21 A pamphlet printed to aid in interpreting the celebratory painting stated that it depicted “no distinction

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between North and South” and was “the largest, most magnificent, and most complete allegorical picture ever exhibited on this side of the Atlantic” rivaling the old Italian masters, Titian and Giorgione.22 This painting, replete with symbolic imagery, reflected upper-class pride in American accomplishments with symbols of the arts, agriculture, and industry. Allegorical female figures of the American republic and Minerva preside over the rest of the figures and represent the US government. Minerva represented “wisdom, poetry, art, science, the manufactures of domestic life, and, above all, with the maintenance of Peace, the basis of true prosperity.”23 The Republic wears a Phrygian cap and holds a triangle, symbolizing order. The figure of the Republic recalls the French Marianne, symbol of liberty, who also wears the Phrygian cap, a soft, limp cap worn by liberated slaves in ancient Greece and Rome. This symbol, adopted by the French during the French Revolution, in turn served as a symbol for the American Republic, liberated from slavery. Peace would allow for white, male-led American culture to develop. The inscription below Minerva and the Republic reads E Pluribus Unum, or “Out of Many, One,” the national motto. Below that are figures heralding trumpets, the American flag, and a bald eagle, whose wing overlaps a sculpture of George Washington. Lions, symbolizing the sovereignty of the American Republic, lead the Republic and Minerva. Below the lions a small group of cherubs sit huddled, each holding emblems of art, education, industry, literature, and medicine, with a large vase on its side spilling fruit and flowers, representing abundance. Additional allegorical figures represent the states of Illinois, Louisiana, South Carolina, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. At the far left, European immigrants lead oxen to plow a bountiful harvest, and still more immigrants arrive by ship. These ships bring more “emigrants to the land of freedom, where industry, enterprise, education, with equal laws and full religious toleration, unite to present, as in a visible vista, equality, wealth, and assured social positions.”24 Stewart, himself an immigrant, benefitted from this freedom. Below the immigrants, the Founding Fathers, shrouded in white robes, arise from a crypt. Below the Founding Fathers, an allegorical figure of war in the form of a muscular, bearded man extinguishes his torch. This figure was present in the 1858 version as well as in the post–Civil War mural. Yvon’s painting also reflected views on race, gender, and class. Groups of indigenous people and formerly enslaved Africans or African Americans reinforce class and gender hierarchies. They anchor the composition at the right. A Confederate soldier lifts up a formerly enslaved man, while a woman of color

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The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

crouches beneath the man’s left arm, indicating her subservience to him. The Confederate soldier represents acceptance of slavery’s end, but the formerly enslaved people’s subordinate positions reveal the belief that these groups needed white men’s civilizing intervention.25 Yvon’s description in the 1870 Paris Salon catalog exudes white superiority: “From the darkness emerge various colored peoples; the Indians appear and then the light of understanding gently touches the Negroes, whom the whites assist to morality and freedom.”26 A white man holds a book prominently labeled “Bible” to indicate the Christian man’s role in educating people of color. Yvon’s painting emphasized the “knowledge and civilization” and morality that the United States’ leading citizens provided for indigenous Americans and formerly enslaved people. The general atmosphere in the United States at this time focused on whites civilizing the populace, as in 1881, when President Chester Arthur banned Native American dances and rituals that were “contrary to civilization.”27 In Genius of America, all of the country’s inhabitants, including indigenous people, African Americans, and immigrants, are on the road to European-inspired US civilization. Women of any race were subservient to men. Although French and later American critics derided the picture as overly ambitious for a juvenile country, the painting made a great claim to US history, however brief that history seemed to be.28 Its grand attempt to celebrate US prosperity, peace, and cohesion met with French skepticism. The French critics found it foolish for a historical allegory of a nation to exist when there was not a “history” to represent, and, as one critic suggested, the Americans only disliked it because the French criticized it.29 Regardless of critical response, nothing else like it existed in any US collection. No other painting so blatantly glorified the United States on such a large scale and exemplified beliefs held by one (and presumably all) of its wealthiest citizens.

­Narrative Genre Paintings Genius of America represented a summary view of upper-class white supremacy, whereas the large numbers of genre paintings depicted ordinary events. Collectors preferred French, rather than American genre paintings. The United States, as some late nineteenth-century writers believed, lacked suitable genre painters and sophisticated, “civilizing” subjects, whereas painters in Paris produced plenty of them for collectors’ homes.30 The orientation of the European themes

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in collecting genre paintings departed from earlier collections of country genre scenes. American paintings that featured rustic country people by mid-century American artists such as William Sidney Mount and native landscapes had dominated the visual tradition in the United States up to the 1860s.31 European genre subjects painted in a realistic and sentimental manner exemplified desired bourgeois ideals of public morality and social harmony.32 Sentimentality refers to a perceived exaggeration of feelings of nostalgia, melancholy, or tenderness. As art historian Rebecca Bedell explained, the prevailing view of sentimentality in the late nineteenth-century United States was positive, unifying, and civilizing.33 American collectors preferred pictures that elicited strong emotions. Nineteenth-century writers explained genre’s appeal. Reporting in The Aldine in 1878, a writer identified as A. Saule also offered some reasons for the popularity of genre paintings in American collections. Genre subjects were visual stories, and people loved novels and stories. Saule explained that the “leading characteristic” of Americans was “an earnestness of character, which militated much against any purely imaginative work.”34 In other words, Americans preferred realistic, narrative subjects, and Saule said: “A genre picture [. . .] is a representation of some phase of human life, and hence the reason it appeals so forcibly to human feeling.” Saule explained that American collectors preferred genre paintings by foreign artists because the United States, with its brief history, had furnished little material for the genre painter.35 Echoing Saule’s opinion, Albert Rhodes, writing in the Galaxy in 1873, stated that genre pictures appealed to viewers for “gentle emotions and amiable sentiments and little domestic scenes” rather than modern subjects “of a harrowing character.”36 In his 1867 book, Aesthetics, or the Science of Beauty, John Bascom, a Williams College professor of rhetoric, claimed that good painters show the range “of human feeling, hope, fear, affection.”37 The successful artist paints with feeling and with truth which stirs the viewers’ hearts. He continued: “Historic virtue, character achieved, heroism reached, are the significant and valuable truths to man, laboring whether in hope or in despair.”38 Scenes with these criteria abounded in the collections. In addition to sentimentality, American collectors sought civility, stability, and social harmony reflected in genre scenes. The social significance of picture collections as didactic and morally uplifting had already taken root by 1850.39 Nineteenth-century American writers and art critics shared a concern for the development of aesthetic taste and a belief in the power of art to transform, educate, and civilize the populace, as demonstrated by Bascom’s book.40

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The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

This belief was evident in an 1866 article in the conservative North American Review that an artwork should educate properly.41 Wealthy white Victorians, who considered themselves moral guardians of American society, both high and low, believed pictures served a moral purpose.42 The collectors themselves expressed concern about the educative aspect of art. Johnston was hailed as “ready to aid any movement which promised to promote in any way the cause of art education, and of fostering a love and knowledge of art among the people.”43 Reflecting this ideology, Belmont said that a “[g]ood picture cannot be exhibited without doing good, both in an artistic and moral point of view.”44 Many pictures’ subjects reflected a moral duty, and good artists exercised “moral power” through their works.45 The era’s best-known social scientist, Carroll D. Wright, opined in his article, “The Practical Value of Art,” that art helped develop one’s character and promoted social and moral wellbeing. Historian Herbert Adams later noted in 1900: “In this age of iron and steel the primary emotions are as constant as other forces of nature. Men, apparently hard and austere, are still moved by real sentiment, by such feelings as love of country, of kith and kin.”46 Adams’s comment refers to men such as Johnston and Vanderbilt, who procured their fortunes in iron and steel. Narrative genre subjects also served as entertainment. Writing about women collectors, art historian Dianne Sachko MacLeod argued that art collections provided “escapist fantasies,” but this was also true for men.47 As Collis Huntington recalled after purchasing Vibert’s Missionary’s Story, now called The Missionary’s Adventures (Figure  3.4), from the Mary Jane Morgan collection, “I sometimes sit for half an hour and look at that picture, the painting seems to fade away and I lose myself in its revelations.”48 In contrast to American subjects perceived as unsophisticated, many European genre pictures such as Vibert’s depicted elegant women and men in well-appointed bourgeois interiors. European genre paintings also depicted the family, children, and everyday activities of different social classes and from previous centuries. There were single-figure compositions as well as crowds of people. Those featuring peasants depicted clean, content, well-fed men, women, and children, such as the adorable pre-teens, toddlers, and baby in Ludwig Knaus’s The Children’s Party (Figure 4.2) in Stewart’s collection. Family, at the heart of Victorian society, also appealed to moral sentiment. Empathy is easily stirred by family relations.49 For one nineteenth-century writer, “The piety of maternal affection is quite enough to charm our eyes and hearts.”50 Toulmouche rendered such heartwarming affection in Maternal

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Figure 4.2  Ludwig Knaus, Children’s Party, c. 1868, 36 × 48 in. (91.4 × 122 cm), oil on canvas, location unknown, formerly Alexander T. Stewart collection. Source: commons. wikimedia.org.

Embraces (Figure  4.3), similar in sentiment to Merle’s Maternal Love (1863, untraced), in the Vanderbilt collection. The subject appealed to that valorizing and romanticizing Madonna-type. As one mawkish critic put it, “who does not melt into tears at the word ‘mother?’”51 Toulmouche depicted his Maternal Embraces in “elegant affection, so touching in its tenderness and so graceful in its pose.”52 Similarly, Merle’s life-size Good Sister (1865, untraced, see Figure 4.4) in the Belmont collection inspired “universal admiration” for its tender sentiment.53 Victorians valued work and country life as an antidote to vice and to industrialization, and women’s role in keeping the family in order. Whereas leisure for the upper class signified status, hard work kept lower-class people virtuous as there was no time for vice. Images of bourgeois vice were absent from collections as though it were absent from the bourgeoisie itself. Instead, vice existed in the realm of the lower classes. Vice is represented in Ludwig Knaus’s Road to Ruin (Figure  4.5) from the Vanderbilt collection. It shows peasants drinking, cavorting, and playing games in a raucous tavern, and exemplifies depravity, setting an example of immoral behavior. Two women at the left implore the young man to leave this sinful pursuit. These women indicated to

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The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

Figure 4.3  Auguste Toulmouche, Maternal Embraces, 1877, oil on canvas, 28 3/4 × 23 1/2 in. (73.0 × 59.5 cm), private collection. Image Courtesy of Skinner, Inc. www. skinnerinc.com.

female viewers their role as agents of morality in addressing bad behavior when their men go astray. More prevalent than paintings that depicted unruly peasants, though, were images of peaceful, well-behaved working peasants. Each of the seven collections included among their genre paintings fewer than a dozen genre paintings featuring peasants, where both men and women were depicted working. Peasants and the artists who painted them were represented in the nineteenth-century United States as simple and gentle. Pictures of peasants retained grace, dignity,

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Figure 4.4  Hugues Merle, The Good Sister, 1862, watercolor, 7 11/16 × 5 3/4 in. (19.5 × 14.6 cm), the Walters Art Museum, art.thewalters.org. This image is similar to Merle’s Good Sister, life size, present location unknown, formerly August Belmont collection. Source: commons.wikimedia.org.

and social harmony in works by Jean-François Millet, Jules Breton, Edouard Frère, and William Bouguereau. Peasants appeared clean, healthy, pious, and content. A well-to-do collector traveling abroad in 1886 wrote to her friend that the Italian peasants she saw were “the most picturesque we have seen anywhere.”54 Such a phrase separates the wealthy from the peasants, as if the peasants were on exhibition for bourgeois viewers. Charles Landelle’s Dolce far niente (Figure 4.6) in the Huntington collection is one such example of a picturesque young Italian

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The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

­Figure 4.5  Ludwig Knaus, Road to Ruin, 1876, 32 1/2 × 43 1/4 in. (82.6 × 109.9 cm), formerly William H. Vanderbilt collection. Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s, Inc. © [April 18, 1945].

peasant. Stewart commissioned Bouguereau’s Return from the Harvest, another example of charming peasants, clean and content. Art historian Laura Meixner suggested that Hudson River School painters pictured pre–Civil War America as an Eden, but after the demoralizing war, there was a shift in self-identity toward a sense of disunity in the United States. In contrast, French paintings provided a comforting distance from troubles at home.55 These idealized peasant paintings distanced the peasants as picturesque objects but also helped alleviate feelings of guilt or discomfort over the vast disparity in wealth between collectors and the lower classes.56 In the late nineteenth century, the artists were believed to be as wholesome as the peasants they depicted. Millet in particular captured the public’s attention with his humble images of working men and women. According to Meixner’s study of public reactions to Millet’s peasants, contemporaries also felt nostalgia for an idyllic preindustrial past.57 Vanderbilt famously remarked that Millet’s Sower (Figure 4.7) appealed to him, not because of Millet’s stature as an artist, but because the scene reminded him of his quiet days working

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Figure 4.6  John S. Davis, after Charles Landelle, Dolce Far Niente, formerly Collis P. Huntington collection. Source: The Aldine 7, no. 21 (September 1875), cover image.

his Staten Island farm, before he made his millions.58 Sentimental longing for his own simpler past motivated him to purchase this now canonical work. Meixner also suggested that Americans saw Millet’s work as symbolizing their ability to rise from their humble origins through hard work. Avery, Belmont, Stewart, Huntington, and other self-made men transcended their own modest beginnings through hard work and business acumen.59 Such images also allowed US viewers to ignore the legacy of slavery, and the men and women of color who labored in the fields.60

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The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

Figure 4.7  Jean-François Millet, The Sower, 1850, oil on canvas, 39 1/4 × 31 1/2 in. (99.7 × 80 cm), Yamanashi Prefectural Museum, Kofo, Japan, formerly in the William H. Vanderbilt collection. Source: Clarence Cook, Art and Artists of Our Time (New York: Selmar Hess, 1888), vol. 1, p. 240.

Millet’s own peasant origins, life of rural labor, and commendable personal life attracted admiration. The children’s magazine, St. Nicholas, presented him as a model father and artist and used Vanderbilt’s Sower to illustrate the story. Author, critic, historian, and journalist Ripley Hitchcock explained that Millet’s figures display “truth of action,” “genuineness,” and “simplicity.”61 He admired Millet’s hard labor in his art and in his own fields, and, according to Hitchcock, children were the gentle man’s favorite companions. The art reflected the artist’s

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character.62 To have such a reminder of the artist’s truth, goodness, and homeliness reflected in his artworks in the Victorian home served as ideal moral models. Peaceful peasants served as reminders of humility and hard work, both desired moral behaviors. Millet’s toiling peasants also presented no threat to the upper classes in their contentment and in their small numbers. His pictures helped them escape their current difficulties with workers’ dissatisfaction and strikes. Like Millet, Jules Breton presumably lived an exemplary, unassuming life and was admired for his poetic paintings. According to Eugene Benson, both painters “understood and rendered the peasant in a noble manner and sometimes with a religious sentiment—always in a natural, humane, and poetic fashion.”63 Echoing that nineteenth-century interpretation, Madeleine Fidell-Beaufort explained that Breton appealed to Americans because his rural laborers seemed to offer an alternate religion—wholesome peasants living in a seemingly classless society. Breton’s subjects personified a veneration for nature with religious overtones.64 Perceived much like Millet and Breton, Pierre-Édouard Frère earned a reputation for kindness, generosity, and simplicity. He established an artists’ colony just north of Paris at Écouen. Frère charmed French and American collectors alike with his homely scenes of children. Clarence Cook compared Frère’s sympathetic renderings of the poor to Charles Dickens’ literature: “He can make a picture out of the slightest incident, and touch our hearts as deftly as ever did Dickens himself in sympathy for the poor.”65 Clara Stranahan, who wrote a history of nineteenth-century French art, considered Frère the founder of the “School of Sympathetic Genre.”66 Frère’s paintings inspired pity in viewers who owned so much more than the poor children, content with the little they had. Cook summed up Frère’s skill: he told his story “with delightful clearness, and the sentiment is always true, unconscious, absolutely free from affectation or make-believe.”67 One such work in Morgan’s collection was Prayer (untraced), one of Frère’s numerous praying scenes. A similar one, The Evening Prayer (Figure 4.8), is in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Peasants praying reflected a belief in their humble virtuousness. Most other peasant women were shown toiling in fields or occupied with domestic chores. In contrast to white working peasants, images of bourgeois women featured them at leisure in well-appointed interiors by artists such as Jules-Émile Saintin, Auguste Toulmouche, and Jules-Adolphe Goupil. Ideal images of young women were popular subjects with both male and female collectors. Art historian Bailey Van Hook analyzed the images of women that permeated American

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The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

Figure 4.8  Pierre-Édouard Frère, The Evening Prayer, 1857, oil on panel, 18 5/16 × 15 3/16 in. (46.5 × 38.5 cm). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Source: commons.wikimedia.org.

painting in the late nineteenth century, and discovered that they stemmed from pervasive representation in the Paris Salon.68 Bourgeois women lounged in decorative interiors, waited for lovers, visited each other, admired or held their children, or played with pets.69 Louis-Auguste-Georges Loustaunau’s Morning Read, from the Vanderbilt collection, pictures an elegantly dressed couple at breakfast. Against a tapestry-covered backdrop, the husband, engrossed in reading the newspaper, ignores his stylish wife. Other women represented in paintings were foreign (Italian, Spanish, Persian, Turkish) such as Landelle’s

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Dolce Far Niente (Figure 4.6) or historical or literary figures such as Sappho and Desdemona. There were also some nymphs and mythological figures. Alfred Steven’s Ready for the Fancy Dress Ball (1879) (Figure 4.9) commissioned for the Vanderbilt collection exemplifies one of these typical fashionable interiors with two women and children lavishly dressed and ready for a ball, a popular entertainment for the upper classes. At the right a smiling woman wearing a long white gown presents two young children to an amiable woman at left who wears a striking fur-trimmed red velvet coat over her dark green gown. Between the two women is a table with a fancy silver tea set. These are just the types of European women that upper-class American women emulated. Wolfe wears one of these chic French gowns in her portrait by Cabanel (Figure  4.10). As Van Hook noted, the bourgeois, Anglo-Saxon woman’s elegant dress and setting and her leisure activity signified her high status.70 The ideal white American woman’s construction resulted from these images produced during the Gilded Age picture rush.71

Figure 4.9  Alfred Stevens, Ready for the Fancy Dress Ball, 1872, oil on canvas, 35 3/4 × 46 in. (90.8 × 116.8 cm), formerly William H. Vanderbilt collection. Private ­collection. Photograph Courtesy of Sotheby’s, Inc. © [November 22, 2016].

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The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

Figure 4.10  Alexandre Cabanel, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe (1828–1887), 1876, oil on canvas, 67 1/2 × 42 3/4 in. (171.5 × 108.6 cm), Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Bequest of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, 1887, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org.

Literary Role Models Gendered, particularly feminine stereotypes, were often at the heart of the sentimental depiction whether alone, with children, or with husbands or suitors. Single figures of women, historic and literary, were often shown gazing with melancholy eyes, such as Jules Joseph Lefebvre’s Sappho, from the Morgan collection and Graziella from the Wolfe collection.72 Vanderbilt owned Cabanel’s

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Pia de Tolomei (Figure 4.11), which Van Hook interpreted as lacking narrative.73 However, for nineteenth-century viewers, it recalled European and American literary connections. Pia de Tolomei, a figure from Dante’s Divine Comedy, later inspired American writers Henry Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The ill-fated young woman descended from a wealthy noble Sienese family and married a powerful lord in the thirteenth century. However, her suspicious husband, believing her faithless, exposed her to poisonous air that killed her.

Figure 4.11  Alexandre Cabanel, Pia de Tolomei, 1876, oil on canvas, 56 × 39 in. (142.2 × 99.1 cm), present location unknown, formerly William H. Vanderbilt collection. Source: E. Strahan, Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and Collection (Boston, 1883–1884), vol. 3, p. 48.

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The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

Cabanel’s letter to William Henry Vanderbilt explained the literary connection of the subject and highlighted its sentimentality: Alfieri [sic—Aligheri] has written a fine tragedy, and many poets have sung the beauty and the sad fate of Pia dei Tolomei [. . .]. My artist friends, and those in whom I place great confidence, have praised the picture very highly; and, for my own part, I am well pleased that this picture is to go to you, for I consider it not only one of my very best works, but also one of the most affecting that I have painted.74

­ abanel, known in the United States for “his unfailing gentleness and kindliness C of demeanor,” declared his pride in the sentimentality he represented in his painting.75 Pia dei Tolomei’s poetic melancholy, reverie, and tragically wrongful death evoked sympathy for her. Literary scenes reinforced gender and class aspirations. Hugues Merle painted a life-size version of the doomed Shakespearean lovers Hamlet and Ophelia (Figure  4.12), in the Stewart collection. Stewart avidly read English and American literature and liked history. American actor Edwin Booth, one of the most popular Shakespearean actors of his time, played his signature role as Hamlet to acclaim; however, Merle based his characters after Charles Gounod’s Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1, with Jean-Baptiste Faure and Christine Nilsson singing the lead roles in Paris in 1869. The moment depicts Hamlet, with outstretched arm, sternly advising Ophelia, holding a prayer book, to enter a nunnery. Angry at his own mother’s marriage to his uncle, Hamlet condemns all women, including the honest, loving Ophelia, whom he mistreats. Her father and brother believed in her virtue. After Hamlet killed her father, Ophelia became insane. Merle’s painting elicited strong emotions in Victorian viewers. Writing in 1892, David Wheeler, then president of Allegheny College in Northwestern Pennsylvania, waxed poetic on Merle’s Hamlet and Ophelia. Of all known paintings of the couple, Wheeler felt that only Merle truly captured Shakespeare’s complex characters. He enthused: Seldom has so much emotion found voice in a pictured face as the artist has mirrored in the face of Hamlet: and this storm-tossed soul crying out of a human face has its fitting companion in the solemn calm shining in the face of Ophelia. [. . .] were ever lovers so sad of face and attitude as these? In Ophelia this sadness is deep and resigned and stately calm. In Hamlet the sadness is terrible with the energy of action. [. . .] Sadness is the keynote of the picture; but this sadness

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has its meaning in a deeper emotion. [. . .] In him it is the shadow on his whole life; a large perception of the hopelessness of hope itself. In her it is a touching and most pitiful submission to a wholly uncomprehended fate, for she does not know the horrible revelations which have made it impossible for Hamlet ever again to enjoy peace.76

Wheeler spoke earnestly about the intense emotionalism that drew late nineteenth-century viewers to Merle’s melancholic characters. Merle captured the “deeper emotion” behind his two expressive characters. In doing so, he

Figure 4.12  Hugues Merle, Hamlet and Ophelia, 1873, oil on canvas, 66 × 46 in. (167.6 × 116.8 cm), private collection, formerly Alexander T. Stewart collection. Source: Edward Strahan, Art Treasure of America, vol. 1, opp. p. 40.

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contrasted the genders: Hamlet is active and knowing (“storm-tossed soul,” “energy of action”), and Ophelia is passive and unknowing (“resigned,” “submission”). Merle depicted another pair of Shakespearean lovers, Ferdinand and Miranda (Figure  4.13), from the Tempest (Act 3, Scene 1). Collis Huntington acquired Ferdinand and Miranda from Avery’s gallery, where it had been on view in 1879. Ferdinand, clad in black and red, kneels before Miranda, who wears a yellow satin dress, while her father, Prospero, looks on from dark shadows at the left.

Figure 4.13  Hugues Merle, Ferdinand and Miranda, 1877, oil on canvas, 61 1/4 × 45 1/2 in. (155.5 × 115.6 cm), present location unknown, formerly Collis P. Huntington collection. Source: Description of Pictures Belonging to Collis Potter Huntington (New York: S. I., 1896), vol. 2, p. 88. The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

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Ariel hovers above Ferdinand in the background. Farther back at right, Caliban hauls a heavy load on his back. Ferdinand instantly fell in love with Miranda, but Prospero disapproved. Later, seeing that the pair shared their love, Prospero allowed them to marry, a happy ending for all. Various excerpts from reviews in New Pictures at Avery’s Art Galleries predicted that Merle’s life-size work would be a fast favorite. Each protagonist’s depiction received lavish praise. One particular comment contrasts the genders: “Nothing can exceed the manliness and fervor of the lover Ferdinand, or the pure loveliness of Miranda.”77 Energy and “manliness” contrast with the woman’s beauty. Another source found Miranda’s face “full of sweetness and intelligence.”78 Again Miranda appears as an ideal gentlewoman. Other comments addressed the picture’s overall appeal, such as praise for “the joyous superiority to the actual wrinkles and sorrows of common life,” which directly address the picture’s idealism.79 Yet it appeared as a reality, “as near nature as can be approached on canvas,” and “every detail is finished with exquisite taste.”80 Merle depicted the scene with “intellectual grace.”81 In each of his Shakespearean scenes for Stewart and for Huntington, Merle penetrated the characters’ complex personalities on a two-dimensional surface. Shakespeare’s works were believed to help develop one’s capacity to identify moral behavior.82

M ­ ilitary Dignity Whereas beauty, luxury, grace, virtue, and leisure defined the bourgeois woman, action, nobility, and dignity defined masculinity.83 Male subjects were depicted drinking, smoking, reading, or engaged in other activities. Military figures were especially associated with ideal images of masculinity. Military pictures depicted soldiers at rest, taking breaks, or engaged in battles. Wolfe and Morgan as well as the male collectors owned such works. Many were soldiers or military men in historical costume. Although few in number in the collections, they were among the staples and commanded high prices. Collectors admired Meissonier’s Napoleonic and eighteenth-century subjects and Edouard Detaille’s and Alphonse de Neuville’s Franco-Prussian War scenes.84 Meissonier’s fierce patriotism was well known. Meissonier, Detaille (Meissonier’s only student), and de Neuville participated in the war and witnessed events firsthand. They typically portrayed unremarkable events rather than the apex of elaborate battles, victorious or not, and anonymous

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soldiers more often than high-ranking military leaders. One French critic aptly noted their appeal, that even in defeat, “they did not fall without glory.”85 Regardless of situation or outcome, the French remained honorable and worthy of admiration. Meissonier’s largest canvas, 1807, Friedland (Figure  3.6), a Napoleonic victory, attracted attention for its patriotic theme. Napoleon Bonaparte won a spectacular victory against the Russians at Friedland (then East Prussia, now Kaliningrad, Russia) on June 14, 1807. Foremost, as the Art Amateur wrote, it depicts the “strength of devotion,” and “loyalty and worship” for their leader, Napoleon.86 Napoleon sits calmly and stoically on his white charger, reviews his cuirassiers, and raises his hat to his devoted troops. Surrounding him are his chief of staff and marshals. Spirited soldiers salute him as they charge ahead on horseback. All are healthy, well fed, and energized despite an exhausting battle. A lush, grassy landscape glows under bright sun and blue skies. Optimism pervades the landscape. Meissonier completed this painting shortly after the Franco-Prussian War and Commune. He based the scene on an equally uplifting description by former French president, Adolphe Thiers.87 Napoleon’s victory symbolized an admirable French patriotism.88 Aside from the painting’s content, Meissonier himself may have been more exemplary than his paintings. Writers rarely failed to mention his perfectionism and accuracy. In his historical works, he penetrated “into the very heart and soul of his characters, the observation, the patience, the fixity of purpose, the persistency” reflected in his work.89 But they also admired his character and marveled at his work habits. Well-known American writer Elbert Hubbard described Meissonier in 1898, “He was a great artist, and, better still, a great man—proud, frank, fearless, and conscientious.”90 Critic Theodore Child observed that Meissonier consistently and thoughtfully “studied and reasoned out” every part of his paintings.91 A German writer commented in 1888 on Meissonier’s truth to nature and to himself and extolled “the virility which manifests itself in his whole manner of contemplating nature [. . .] and in his whole fiery, energetic being.”92 This was high praise considering Meissonier detested Germans because of the Franco-Prussian War. Meissonier embodied manliness and an admirable work ethic. Americans bought not only faultless paintings but also Meissonier’s aura of patriotism, intelligence, diligence, and masculinity. Unlike Meissonier’s Napoleonic and eighteenth-century military figures, Detaille’s and de Neuville’s military scenes depicted the Franco-Prussian

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War. Every painting of valiant, anonymous soldiers fighting for their country reminded viewers of French glory and reinforced notions of masculinity. The war took place in 1870 and resulted in a humiliating French defeat by the Prussians, followed by a disastrous civil war. In brief, Napoleon III’s failed attempt to annex Luxembourg angered the Prussian leader, Otto von Bismarck, and led to war. Napoleon’s army quickly fell to the Prussians. The Franco-Prussian war resulted in unification of Germany and Italy.93 France lost Alsace and part of Lorraine to a unified Germany. Stung by the humiliating defeat, the French engaged in a disastrous civil war, the Paris Commune in 1871. This war, fought only a few years after the American Civil War, lingered in memory.94 However, descriptions of these pictures did not reference the US war. Despite France’s swift and devastating losses, the French artists’ renditions of the war appeared as noble struggles. The French artists depicted “heroism of defeat, administered with almost as much gratification [. . .] as if they had been” French successes.95 Military pageantry is absent from Detaille’s and de Neuville’s paintings. As one writer noted, “Men who had shared experiences such as these had naturally no wish to continue the series of theatrical glorifications of military vanity and their return to truth was fostered by the slow regeneration of those classes of the nation out of which new social strata are now being formed.”96 The artists were ordinary but admirable soldiers depicting truthful episodes from war after their return to civilian life. Historian Sven Beckert pursued another train of thought in terms of social class. Bourgeois New Yorkers, rattled by the Paris Commune, where a militant working class rose up against the bourgeoisie, were eager to prevent similar activities in their city.97 The (male) bourgeoisie crushed the proletariat. Thus, Franco-Prussian war scenes reminded viewers of the power of the ruling classes to command the lower classes. Among the best-known military paintings in American collections were Edouard Detaille’s Arrest of the Ambulance Corps in the Eastern Part of France, January, 1871, 1878 (Figure 4.14) and de Neuville’s Le Bourget, 1873 (Figure 4.15). Detaille’s Arrest of the Ambulance Corps, painted to order for William Henry Vanderbilt in 1878, features Prussian officers on horseback questioning a group of French red-cross soldiers.98 The dead body of a Bavarian foot soldier lies on the snow in the foreground. German soldiers occupy the end of the street and stand at the entrance to a bullet-spattered house.99 The artist gave Vanderbilt a detailed description of his painting:

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Figure 4.14  Edouard Detaille, Arrest of the Ambulance Corps in the Eastern Part of France, January, 1871, 1878, oil on canvas, 31 1/2 × 51 1/4 in. (80 × 130 cm), formerly William H. Vanderbilt collection. Source: Edward Strahan, Art Treasure of America, vol. 3, opp. p. 106.

Figure 4.15  Photo-aquatint by Goupil & Co., 1870, after Alphonse de Neuville, Le Bourget, 1878, platemark 21.5 × 26.4 cm. Original oil on canvas, 68 × 99 in. (172.7 × 251.5 cm), private collection, formerly William H. Vanderbilt collection. Source: Wellcome Collection. CC BY.

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They are civil Ambulanciers, who have been taken by a Prussian patrol in a village where a battle has taken place. When their papers have been examined and recognized in order by the Prussian general, they will be released and authorized to collect the wounded and assist in the German infirmaries. The spot where the scene is laid is a village in Franche-Comté; they have fought there; the Germans occupy it. The foot-soldiers who surround the ambulances are Prussian Chasseurs [. . .] The Prussian general is accompanied by an officer of the Hussars [. . .] and by an officer of the staff; his cap and cloth-facing of amaranth. The two other officers are: the one in blue tunic and yellow collar, an officer of the Dragoons; the other, an officer of the Cuirassiers [. . .] The dead body in the foreground is that of a Bavarian foot-soldier. Those are also Bavarians who are at the end of the street, and at the entrance of the house under the façade, and pierced by bullets.100

His description alongside the visual document “make[s] up a vividly truthful picture” and shows “the actualities of war” for which the viewers are spectators and witnesses.101 As one American columnist wrote, tying art to religion: “all good art and all good sermons have a common foundation in truth.”102 The appearance of truth in representation was integral to late nineteenth-century paintings’ authenticity. Detaille’s accounts in Arrest of the Ambulance Corps reflected his personal experience. Detaille’s comrade de Neuville served as an officer in the Franco-Prussian War, and his personal experiences during the Franco-Prussian War guaranteed his authenticity for contemporaries. According to one obituary, the artist’s studio resembled war wreckage. He surrounded himself with broken cannon-wheels, bloody mattresses, muddy straw, battle-stained uniforms, casques all battered with bullets, guns and rifles of all kinds, broken swords, and other accessories of real, earnest warfare. The very walls of the studio are full of bullet marks, the painter having fired at the plaster himself in order to get faithful models for the details of his pictures even in this minute particular.103

His studio filled with military paraphernalia added to his paintings’ aura of truthfulness, realism, and masculinity. De Neuville also helped defend his country at Le Bourget. In his masterful painting, Le Bourget, de Neuville illustrated a battle from General Ducrot’s La défense de Paris (1870–1871).104 The French initially captured Le Bourget on October 30, 1870, but soon fell victim to the Germans. Before then, they captured one hundred German prisoners. Then the tables turned. The small

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band of French officers and civilians bravely defended themselves in the village church. An account of de Neuville’s painting sums up its appeal as a noble battle depicting [the] desperate effort of the garrison of Paris, consisting of mobiles, volunteers, and a few regulars who had escaped from the defeated armies. Eight officers and about twenty men refused to be beaten; they retired into the church and held it for some time—indeed it required a cannon to be brought up ere they would capitulate. When the doors were forced open nearly all the garrison were wounded or dead. It was grand and heroic, but utterly useless. [. . .] many men were carried away by enthusiasm and emotion and sacrificed their lives, bravely.105

His own words, “refused to be beaten,” “grand,” “heroic,” and “bravely,” reinforce desired masculine characteristics. In addition, sentiment (“emotion”), narrative, and technical skill converged in this painting. St. Nicholas Church anchors the composition at left, and a cannon plowing ahead anchors the right. De Neuville depicted the cold, unpitying German men saluting the wounded French victims in such an uncaring manner that could “convert the coldest spectator into a Frenchman by their [the Germans’] cynic unconcern.”106 Goupil & Co. reproduced the painting and aided its renown. French and American admirers alike considered Le Bourget de Neuville’s masterpiece. The Art Amateur called it “a proud and virile composition, the greatest work, for feeling and depth, that has come out of the events of 1870– 1871.”107 Clarence Cook proclaimed Le Bourget “a work of great power, and [. . .] one of the most interesting of the military paintings of our time.”108 He added that de Neuville’s paintings “move us because they are the expression of sincere feeling.”109 Cook linked feeling, along with masculine adjectives such as “proud,” “power,” and “virile,” de Neuville’s representation with sentimentality, a nostalgia for these masculine traits.

Religious Piety In contrast to the masculinity of military paintings, religious pictures often featured women’s and girls’ piety. Religious pictures include saints, church scenes, and rituals such as processions. Writing in 1883, artist Henry Bacon suggested that a demand for realism made religious subjects difficult to

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portray.110 Artists risked portraying religious figures as too ordinary, but their humanity appealed to collectors who admired their realism. None of the seven collectors was Catholic; thus, there were few religious paintings that depicted scenes one associates with the Catholic Italian Renaissance, such as crucifixions, saints, and Madonnas. Yet each of the collectors, even August Belmont, who was Jewish, owned at least one painting of a saint, Jesus Christ, and/or a Holy Family. However, most religious subjects were treated as genre paintings featuring aspects of everyday life. They showed people living pious Christian lives, such as Jules Breton’s Communicants in Morgan’s collection. Some were well dressed, some were peasants, and often the praying figures were women or girls (Figure 4.8). Morgan and Wolfe owned more religious pictures than four of their five male counterparts. Only Huntington owned more (see Table 4.1). Does this indicate that these three collectors were more devout than the others? Simply owning the pictures does not offer conclusive evidence of a collector’s own personal piety, but it can offer hints. Morgan owned more images of saints and Holy Families than did the other six collectors.111 Was she more religious than the others? What did she think about her husband, a former slaveholder? The only two religious books in the sale of her library were an album entitled Bishops of America and Gustave Doré’s La Sainte Bible. Both were heavily illustrated.112 The two pictures of saints in Morgan’s collection were both bust-length images of women, Merle’s St. Elizabeth of Hungary (Figure  4.16) and Jean-Jacques Henner’s St. Fabiola (Figure 4.17) (untraced—Huntington purchased St. Fabiola from the Morgan sale).113 St. Elizabeth is the patron saint of beggars, bakers, and charities. She was a widowed princess who founded a hospital and dedicated her life both during and after her marriage to serving the poor. St. Fabiola, a wealthy mid-fourth-century Roman woman who divorced her scoundrel husband, is a patron saint of divorced or abused women. She became a physician and founded the first hospital in the West.114 Why did these two saints attract Morgan? Perhaps these women offered an alternative model to the ideal mothers so popular in genre painting. Both saints founded hospitals. Did Morgan plan to found one? Morgan herself was childless and left no will but quietly supported charities through her Episcopal church. Wolfe, a devout Episcopalian, owned William Kaulbach’s grand Crusaders before Jerusalem, Karl Piloty’s Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, Jules Breton’s Religious Procession in Brittany, Frère’s Visit of a Sister of Charity, Diaz’s

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Figure 4.16  Hugues Merle, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, 1879, oil on canvas, 22 × 18 1/4 in. (55.9 × 46.4 cm). Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI, formerly Mary Jane Morgan collection. Source: commons.wikimedia.org.

Holy Family, and Cabanel’s Shulamite (Figure  4.18), a subject from the Old Testament Song of Songs. In addition, she owned Vibert’s Startled Confessor and Palm Sunday in Spain, which depicts a religious holiday. The most admired religious pictures in Wolfe’s collection were Ludwig Knaus’s Holy Family and Gabriel Max’s Christian Martyr, Last Prayer (Figure  4.19), the former for its sweetness and the latter for its pathos.

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Figure 4.17  Jean-Jacques Henner, Fabiola, Salon of 1885, 13 × 16 1/2 in. (33 × 41.9 cm), location unknown, formerly Mary Jane Morgan, then Collis P. Huntington collection. Source: commons.wikimedia.org.

Not all religious images were pious. In the 1880s, Morgan, Vanderbilt, Wolfe, and Huntington owned paintings by Jehan-Georges Vibert. Vibert satirized Catholic cardinals wearing brilliantly painted rich, red robes.115 His use of this rich red came to be called “Vibert red.” Morgan, an Episcopalian, then Huntington, a Unitarian, purchased Vibert’s The Missionary’s Adventures (Figure  3.4). In the painting, a missionary performing religious work speaks earnestly to indifferent richly garbed prelates. Anti-clerical sentiment in France stemmed

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Figure 4.18  François Flameng, after Alexandre Cabanel, Shulamite, 1876, original oil on canvas, 56 × 39 in. (142.2 × 99.1 cm), present location unknown, formerly Catharine Lorillard Wolfe collection. Source: Clarence Cook, Art and Artists of Our Time (New York: Selmar Hess, 1888), vol. 1, opp. p. 74.

from the French Revolution and continued into the nineteenth century. These sentiments also crossed the Atlantic. However, according to a 1902 obituary of the artist, Vibert’s “pictorial polemics against church and clergy” were rendered “harmless” because of the artist’s humorous depiction.116 They were perceived as witty (at least on the surface) rather than damning. Ironically, the Protestant collectors lived in the lavish settings enjoyed by the high-ranking Catholic Church officials depicted in Vibert’s paintings.

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­Figure 4.19  Gabriel Max, The Last Token: A Christian Martyr, oil on canvas, 67 1/2 × 47 in. (171.5 × 119.4 cm), Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Bequest of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, 1887, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org.

Orientalist Fictions Images of the Middle East (the Holy Land) and North Africa fascinated Americans, most of whom did not travel beyond Europe. Wolfe commissioned Cabanel’s Shulamite (Figure 4.18), in 1875, exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1876. Reproductions of the painting were often accompanied by the verses from the Bible (Song of Solomon 2:8–13).117 After seeing the Shulamite (woman of Jerusalem), a humble but beautiful young peasant girl, King Solomon added her

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to his extensive harem as a favorite, but she already loved another. In Cabanel’s life-size painting, the lightly clad dark-haired Biblical heroine, seated on a couch in a lush garden, listens to her shepherd lover’s song. Wolfe treasured the work and gave it a favored spot in her home.118 Critics neglected to comment on the sensuality of this partially nude figure or on her illicit love. The Biblical passage seemed to erase its eroticism. Instead, one critic opined that the Shulamite was one of Cabanel’s best paintings and observed that Cabanel was among Wolfe’s favorite painters.119 Another found it one of the most notable paintings in the collection.120 However, others writing in 1887 were less enthusiastic, viewing the subject as overly sentimental and outdated, but still disregarding its sensuality and Biblical inaccuracy.121 In the Bible she is called “black” (Song of Solomon 1:5), yet Cabanel depicted her with light skin. Wolfe also owned Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Prayer in the Mosque (Figure 4.20), a fictional image of Muslims at prayer. Wolfe funded expeditions to the Middle East, and owning such a painting indicates her interest in a culture that practiced a religion other than her own. In his didactic description of the painting, Edward Strahan, Gérôme’s former student, first noted that the mosque of Amrou in Cairo dated from the seventh century; its antiquity indicated the age of the religion as well as the architecture. He called attention to the mihrab (confusing it with the qibla wall, which he spelled “kiblah”) at the left, explaining: “his face turned toward the ‘Kiblah,’ the small niche which, in all mosques, serves to indicate the direction of the temple [sic] of Mecca.”122 He used the painting as a document of the Islamic faith and informed readers about the rituals of Islamic prayer. William Henry Vanderbilt owned Gérôme’s Orientalist painting, The Sword Dance (Figure 4.21), a picture that critics considered ethnographically accurate, if immoral, and technically perfect. The dancer is fully clothed, although her arms, face, and stomach are covered with transparent material. Prior to Vanderbilt’s purchase, the painting received praise during its exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in 1877. The composition and fidelity of the picture are exceedingly true to and characteristic of Eastern life, and the tone and balance of colour are inimitable. [. . .] Accuracy and beauty of drawing are seen in every several figure or portion of a figure; the atmospheric feeling and the management of light and shadow are perfect, the colour and tone are full and harmonious, and there is a combination of simplicity, force, and convergence, which prove Gérôme’s mastery over the difficulties of composition.123

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Figure 4.20  Jean-Léon Gérôme, Prayer in the Mosque, 1871, Oil on canvas, 35 × 29 1/2 in. (88.9 × 74.9 cm), Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Bequest of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, 1887, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org.

As confirmed by the reviewer, Gérôme’s Orientalist paintings possessed a studied accuracy and formal perfection. Gérôme’s travels to Algeria or Egypt which likely inspired this scene greatly enhanced his reputation an ethnographer. The Sword Dance’s content—a dancer performing for lounging men—though was considered immoral, but glossed over in the review. Despite the problematic subject, the painting’s ethnographical and technical merits made this painting acceptable for the collector. Discussing technical merits allowed some critics to skirt difficult subjects.124

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­Figure 4.21  Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Sword Dance, 1875, oil on canvas, 42 × 25 in. (106.7 × 63.5 cm), present location unknown, formerly William H. Vanderbilt collection. Source: Edward Strahan, Art Treasure of America, vol. 3, opp. p. 95.

Benson found Gérôme’s Almeh (1863), another dancer, “obnoxious as a matter of taste and of art, [but it] has its value as a study of life in the East.” His painting, however, was inaccurate. An almeh (‘ālma`h), singular for ‘awālim, performed only in the women’s quarters of upper-class homes, although performing contexts may have changed by the mid-nineteenth century.125 Gérôme’s Almeh dances for men. As pictured, nineteenth-century critics found the dance to be “seductive to the gross taste of a sensual race; a race without sentiment, but austere and passionate.”126 That this culture was perceived as lacking sentiment is significant. US critics and collectors believed that people living in the Middle East, North Africa, and Turkey lacked the civilizing qualities and feelings of sympathy that were so important for collectors. A reviewer who saw Gérôme’s Almeh at Knoedler’s called it an “Oriental ‘concert-saloon’” with “half-savage Arnaouts” watching. Knoedler published “a little explanatory programme” stating “that no eulogy is ‘necessary to establish the merit or vindicate the moral significance of this remarkable picture.’”127 However, a reviewer found the Almeh “devoid of moral conscience” and instead discussed its technical finesse.128 Gérôme’s Almeh inspired the term “danse du ventre,” translated later into English as “belly dance,” a term still in use today and still with erotic colonialist connotations.129 The dance intrigued yet offended American morals and reinforced racial hierarchies.130

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As one of the most “authentic” painters, Gérôme documented unknown, exotic cultures that repulsed yet attracted “civilized” nineteenth-century viewers and reinforced negative stereotypes of non-European cultures. Critics (some of them, such as Benson, Earl Shinn [Edward Strahan], Will H. Low, all former students of Gérôme) justified Gérôme’s unchaste, and thus immoral, Orientalist nudes by referring to the artist’s presumed authenticity. Both Benson and Shinn asserted that he recorded what he saw on his travels to the Near East and North Africa with a realist’s objective eye. He transcribed Eastern life for Western audiences. Strahan said of the Slave Market in the Belmont collection: “Having seen the libertine horrors of the odalisque-market, the painter finds no nearer duty than that of transcribing them.”131 However, no parallels were drawn to slavery in the United States. Instead, Gérôme eroticized and exoticized slavery. Strahan’s comment absolves the purchaser of his works. In a strange twist of logic, owning the work was akin to condemning the activity depicted. Gérôme also offered his own excuse for erotic subjects. Glessner quoted Gérôme as explaining that his nude women were futile attempts to paint human flesh. Gérôme kept trying to paint the nude in order to improve. This persistence in chasing perfection diverted attention from prurient subject matter to the artist’s admirable perseverance. Collectors admired hard work and “objective” representations. Thus, displaying an “immoral” subject represented with academic accuracy coupled with determination to achieve technical perfection made such work palatable to the collector, if not to all the critics.132 Small numbers of nude or nearly nude women such as these entered collections, although collectors distanced themselves from such pictures. Nudes were considered immoral.133 However, nudes in men’s collections (wives were not considered) seemed to be more problematic than nudes in women’s collections. Eugene Benson defended Johnston’s picture by Charles Gleyre, The Bath, a genre scene set in antiquity and featuring a nude woman overseeing a baby’s bath.134 He preceded his mention of The Bath with a page-long prologue about the beauty and chasteness of nature, including the nude, as a means of justifying the depiction. Both Morgan and Wolfe purchased paintings of nude or nearly nude women. However, the nudes in their collections were viewed favorably. Rather than defend nude women in various guises, critics praised them. Critics described the seminudes in relation to their Orientalist literary characters in Cabanel’s Shulamite (Figure 4.18) and Charles Chaplin’s Haidee, both in the Wolfe collection.135 Similarly, allegorical figures such as Merle’s Autumn in Wolfe’s collection escaped censure.

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The Henner nudes in Morgan’s collection were praised as “incomparably the most beautiful” figure paintings in her collection.136 The anonymous reviewer from The Critic felt that “no one [. . .] ever painted anything even a thought more lovely” than Henner’s La Source (Figure 3.3), a red-headed nude seated on the bank of a river that was exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1881.137 As Bailey Van Hook noted, nude females were often placed outdoors to reinforce their timelessness and status as high art.138 This timelessness and status needed explanation when the female nude was in a man’s collection but did not when represented in a woman’s collection.

­Landscape, Livestock, and Still-Lifes The second most populous category in each collection were landscapes with few or no people. Landscapes comprised 12 to 20 percent of collections. Johnston’s collection was an exception. About a third of his collection comprised landscape paintings, although he still owned more genre paintings than landscapes. Landscape painting generally lacked the clear narratives offered by genre or history painting desired by Gilded Age picture rush collectors and so retained a sense of timelessness. Writing in 1867, Williams College professor John Bascom opined that landscapes generally provided rest for the mind and contemplation of God’s creations.139 They appealed to a perennial interest in a timeless, tranquil countryside or seaside with no signs of industrialization or unrest.140 Fewer than half of the landscapes in 1870s collections included paintings by Barbizon artists. Instead, the collectors owned landscapes and marine paintings by Düsseldorf artists such as Andreas and Oswald Achenbach as well as by American, Belgian, Swiss, and Dutch artists. Art historian Rebecca Bedell observed that some nineteenth-century collectors preferred Barbizon landscapes over American landscapes because of their sentimentality. American landscape painting appeared too descriptive and detail-oriented, whereas Barbizon landscape paintings appeared poetic, elevated, and tranquil. The French landscapes reflected moods rather than botanical illustration. They appealed to viewers’ emotions.141 However, the fact that most landscapes in the collection were “descriptive” indicates that American collectors appreciated emotional as well as realistic landscapes. By the 1880s, the number of Barbizon landscapes increased, but only the Morgan and Vanderbilt collections included more Barbizon landscapes than those by other artists. Morgan owned the most, twenty-four of her thirty

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landscapes. Vanderbilt owned fourteen Barbizon pictures of his twenty-four landscapes. Johnston, Huntington, and Stewart owned far more landscape paintings by American artists than by French artists. Stewart owned twentyeight landscape paintings, but only one Barbizon landscape, Daubigny’s The End of the Month of May. He, like the others, preferred German and American landscape artists. After genre and landscape paintings, scenes with animals, particularly livestock, were popular. Agrarian nostalgia enhanced the popularity of scenes with pasturing cows and sheep in idyllic landscape settings. The most popular animal painters were Rosa Bonheur, Constant Troyon, Emile van Marcke, Charles Jacque, and Eugène Verboeckhoven. Each of the seven collectors owned paintings by at least two of these five artists. Troyon, one of the Barbizon painters, became the nineteenth-century Paulus Potter or Albert Cuyp.142 His On the Road (Figure 4.22) from the Vanderbilt collection exemplifies a tranquil grazing scene at a time when rural life was increasingly abandoned due to industrialization and factory workers went on strikes. Less lofty but no less significant were Charles Jacque’s pictures of sheep peacefully pasturing or in barns. Jacque, Millet’s

Figure 4.22  Constant Troyon, On the Road, c. 1850, present location unknown, formerly William Henry Vanderbilt collection. Source: E. Strahan, Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and Collection (Boston, 1883–1884), Holland edition, n.p.

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neighbor in Barbizon and himself a farmer, bathed his clean, spacious hay-filled barns and pastures in a golden light. Healthy sheep and chickens, agrarian signs of prosperity, roam freely. Rosa Bonheur, the most famous woman artist of her time, was the foremost animal painter in the late nineteenth century, rivaled only by Sir Edwin Landseer. Five of the seven collectors owned Bonheur’s paintings. Morgan owned two of Bonheur’s works, but none by any other women artists. Wolfe also owned two of Bonheur’s paintings. Vanderbilt owned six works by Bonheur, with whom he felt a certain kinship because they were less than a year apart in age. Stewart owned Rosa Bonheur’s celebrated Horse Fair (Figure 3.1) and her Blacksmith, but no other works by women artists. Belmont owned one painting and three drawings by Rosa Bonheur. Aside from Rosa Bonheur, few other women artists were represented in the collections and their works were not reviewed in the general descriptions of the collections. Cornelia Stewart had her portrait painted by Jeannette Loop, but it was not included as part of the collection. Although Collis Huntington did not own any Bonheur paintings, he bought Harriet Hosmer’s sculpture, Zenobia. Other works by women were largely still lifes or flower paintings, with the exception of American artist Eliza Greatorex’s drawings. Johnston owned two pen-and-ink drawings by Greatorex, one depicting Antwerp Cathedral, and the other a scene of Venice. Greatorex studied with Edouard Lambinet in Paris and spent much time in Europe. In the United States, she was well known for her pen-and-ink Old New York series and later became an etcher.143 She was one of only two female associates of the National Academy of Design, an honor which she received in 1869.144 Every collection included a few still lifes, but only Wolfe’s and Johnston’s included still lifes painted by women. Wolfe’s collection included five works by three different women artists: two paintings by Rosa Bonheur, two still lifes by French artist Eléonore Escallier, and one still life by German artist Emilie Preyer. Escallier, a student of Jules-Claude Ziegler, exhibited in the Paris Salons between 1857 and 1880 and received a medal in 1868. Emilie Preyer’s father, Johann Wilhelm Preyer, taught at the Düsseldorf Royal Academy of Art and was considered to be Germany’s best still life painter. Since women were not allowed in the academy, she learned directly from her father privately and became a leading woman artist in Germany. Johnston also owned four watercolors by three artists: British-born Elizabeth Murray’s Eleventh Hour and flower paintings by two Paris‑based

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artists, Pauline Girardin and a Madame Korner.145 Murray learned to paint from her father, Thomas Heaphy, and became a member of both the Institute of Painters in Water-Colors of London and the American Society of Water-Color Painters in New York. She also published a technical book on painting in watercolor and a travel memoir.146 Few of her works are traced. Little information is available for Girardin or Korner, but Girardin is briefly mentioned in Avery’s and Lucas’s diaries. Avery commissioned a watercolor flower painting from Girardin for 200 francs ($40) in 1875.147 Lucas ordered three watercolors paintings of flowers from Girardin for 600 francs ($120) and four drawings for 120 francs ($24) in 1864.148 In 1867, Lucas visited Girardin to see a small watercolor called Pensées that Avery ordered for 150 francs ($30).149 Watercolors typically sold for much less than oil paintings whether the artist was male or female. For example, Lucas paid ten francs ($2) for a watercolor by Eugène Lami.150 Although few still lifes entered collections, their inclusion offered some women artists an opportunity to be included in important collections.

Conclusion A brief overview of the contents of seven leading New York collections attempted to answer Eugene Benson’s call to discover “the ideas, the tastes, the sentiments, the manners and customs, of the men and women of our epoch.” European genre paintings collected during the Gilded Age picture rush exemplified the white bourgeois ideologies of the cultural arbiters. Genre paintings dominated the major collections and sentimental subjects painted in a realistic manner promoted upper-class ideals of social harmony and public morality. Solid family relations and home anchored the Victorian home. Gender roles of both the upper and the lower classes were reflected in the paintings. Upper-class leisure contrasted with lower-class labor. Understanding the ideologies espoused by these elites provides a clearer picture of US institutional biases that still exist in the twenty-first century. Images of military bravery and heroism in French military paintings also appealed to Gilded Age collectors. Detaille and de Neuville focused primarily on anonymous soldiers’ valor, dignity, and patriotism rather than on military leaders’ exploits. The French artists’ patriotism, notably Meissonier’s, as well as their subjects

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depart from the sentimentality of genre paintings, but served as model masculine behaviors and evoked emotional responses. Sentimental imagery evoked an emotional, sympathetic response in the viewer and was essential to white upperclass sensibility. Emotion and feeling were desirable masculine attributes. Religion was present in the collections in various forms. Yvon’s allegory, Genius of America, serves as a cross section of beliefs about the United States and its sense of Christian white superiority over indigenous and formerly enslaved people. A white man holds up a Bible before a group of people of color. Other paintings mainly featuring females reflected a connection to faith, individual prayer, and rituals. Idealized laboring peasants in pictures reinforced class distinctions and also reflected a belief in peasants’ piety. Subject matter absent or virtually absent also offers insights into the beliefs of late nineteenth-century collectors. Agrarian pictures reflected a nostalgia for the preindustrial world in which the collectors made their fortunes and also presented an idealized view of prosperity earned from the land. However, anything reminiscent of industrialization which led to the collectors’ wealth was largely excluded. Two exceptions regarding railroads or industry were by American artists. Collis Huntington’s collection featured an industrial subject scarcely visible in Albert Bierstadt’s Donner Lake from the Summit, a large landscape painting depicting the most treacherous pass in the Sierra Nevadas for the railroad workers. Building the railroad through this pass was a triumph for Huntington. However, the train is barely noticeable in the vast landscape, and there are no workers. Huntington relied on Chinese labor to build the railroads out west. Huntington and Bierstadt were friends, and the picture hung in the entryway of Huntington’s New York home at 65 Park Avenue.151 Johnston, who was president of the New Jersey Central Railroad, owned Edward Lamson Henry’s The 9:45 Accommodation, which was identified in the 1876 auction catalog as Railway Station, Westchester. In this painting, a train, very prominently pictured, stops at a small station. The train itself was the subject, rather than the workers and laborers who built the railroads and kept them running. Many other subjects were also absent from collections. Images of recent and ongoing conflicts (US Civil War, indigenous people, Chinese laborers, African Americans, immigrants, workers’ strikes, women’s rights) were omitted. In addition, there were no images of suffering (starvation, disease, urban blight, factory workers’ conditions, vivisection, child abuse, animal abuse). Johnston’s collection was again one of the exceptions. He owned Homer’s Civil War

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picture, Prisoners from the Front, and Turner’s Slave Ship.152 Depictions of illness and old age rarely appeared in genre pictures, with a few exceptions.153 Nudes rarely appeared in collections. Despite a desire to emulate European aristocrats, American collectors owned few images of kings and queens and palaces. Lastly, the collections included few works by women artists and none by artists of color. As far as can be ascertained, men’s and women’s motivations for collecting in the 1870s and 1880s were also similar. Women collectors appeared not to favor women artists. Works by just a few women artists were found in each collection, most notably by Rosa Bonheur. Of the seven collectors, Johnston owned works by three women (Murray, Girardin, Korner). Wolfe also owned pictures by different women artists (Bonheur, Escallier, Preyer). Vanderbilt owned six works by Bonheur, and A. T. Stewart owned just one work by a woman, Hosmer’s Zenobia. Cornelia Stewart supported just the one woman, Jeannette Loop, who painted her portrait. Although men’s and women’s collections were similar in composition, some pictures, such as nudes, were problematic in men’s collections but not in women’s collections. That so much information about the collections is available today attests to their significance and the documentation devoted to them. The next chapter discusses how these collections were marketed in journals, exhibitions, and books.

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Marketing the Collections: Loans, Periodicals, Books, and Prints [M]ost of the owners freely loan them [their artworks] from time to time for charitable and other purposes, and thus they become known and are enjoyed by large numbers of persons.1 —Samuel P. Avery, 1883

Throughout the Gilded Age picture rush, collectors and their pictures benefitted from positive media coverage. The amount of information still accessible today indicates the widespread coverage these collections received in the late nineteenth century. Printed media of all kinds reported on the collectors, auctions, loans, artists, and artworks. A variety of books and catalogs provided a broader public a means of accessing private collections. Dealers, critics, writers, collectors, and the French artists’ American students documented and publicized private art collections, such as the three-volume inventory of US art collections, Art Treasures of America.2 The collectors and dealers organized loans and prepared catalogs which shaped the narrative of the individual collectors’ cultural sophistication and philanthropic intentions. In nearly every account, the collectors’ names were inextricably linked with their collections. This chapter surveys several venues—loan exhibitions, collection and auction catalogs, newspapers and journals, prints and reproductions, art history surveys, luxury books, and reproductions—that referenced seven New York City collectors (Belmont, Johnston, Vanderbilt, Stewart, Wolfe, Morgan, and Huntington). Artworks in the United States were scarcely discussed without mentioning the owner. These sources and venues aggrandized the collectors as well as made the art accessible to more people. Press attention to private collections of French art helped spread cultural and aesthetic literacy and placed the collectors in the role of philanthropic educators. In addition, the exhibitions and literature mapped the exploration of the art history canon as it first began to be told in the United States. Collectors’ names were a significant part of this early art history canon.

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­Private Galleries and Loan Exhibitions French author and art critic Émile Durand-Gréville traveled to the United States in 1886 at the behest of the French government, “to see what became of the French pictures swallowed by the great western Republic but never disgorged.”3 Durand-Gréville visited private homes. He noted that Americans claimed that they would have the “museums of the future.”4 However, the art was still in private collections. Collectors kept their artworks within their homes and only occasionally opened them to the public. Select members of the public could visit private collections, some housed in purpose-built domestic art galleries.5 In New York, Belmont, Johnston, and William H. Vanderbilt built separate art galleries.6 The restricted public that visited included the upper classes, artists, art students, dealers, out-of-town guests, and journalists. Johnston’s visitor books included other collectors and American artists among the guests at his receptions. Not surprisingly, Johnston also invited dealers Michael Knoedler and Samuel Avery to his private gallery.7 Alexander T. Stewart, who built a large separate art gallery for his works, did not host public openings. Although Catharine Lorillard Wolfe did not build a separate art gallery, she occasionally admitted visitors.8 Shortly before her death, Mary Jane Morgan began hosting receptions and converted one floor of her home into an art gallery.9 Collis Huntington’s collection hung throughout his home, and like Stewart, he did not host the public. Private galleries such as Vanderbilt’s conveyed information to visitors via catalogs and verbal communication.10 For example, Vanderbilt enjoyed talking about his pictures with his guests, but there is no way to capture to content of this verbal communication. He and other collectors printed several catalogs to guide visitors, but these offered little commentary. Vanderbilt’s first guide accompanied the collection at his townhouse at 459 Fifth Avenue, and then several others guided visitors at his palatial mansion with separate public gallery entrance at 640 Fifth Avenue.11 His first publishers were George Putnam’s Sons, whose father was a founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The practice was interrupted in the early 1880s, when Vanderbilt, as well as Catharine Lorillard Wolfe and August Belmont, suspended public admission due to guests’ “shameful” behavior, such as petty theft.12 Disrespectful guests enforced the need for a public gallery with safety measures to protect art and property. Most people could not view the art in person in private homes but rather became familiar with the collectors and their artworks through publicity and

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loans. Loan collections provided the most accessible venue for viewing art in person. Collectors lent works to special fundraisers or exhibitions at the National Academy of Design or Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In his summary of the New York art market through 1883, Samuel P. Avery commented that collectors’ artworks became widely known through loans.13 Popular journals also reproduced pictures in these well-known collections, making them more accessible to a broader audience. August Belmont was the first of this group to exhibit European art at the National Academy of Design. Belmont’s collection introduced upper-class New Yorkers to contemporary European art. Writing to his father-in-law, Commodore Matthew Perry in 1856, Belmont explained his motives for buying and exhibiting paintings: As I have now a very pretty gallery indeed, containing paintings of most of the first living masters, I have some idea of [displaying] them until my house is built for the benefit of the poor. I think it would answer both for a charitable purpose and help to improve the taste of our New York people for the fine arts, so that in future they adorn their houses with fine pictures instead of filling them with gaudy furniture.14

Shortly after writing to Perry about his intentions, Belmont loaned his newly formed art collection of 110 pictures to the National Academy of Design, New York’s premier art institution (not exactly a place for “the poor”). Although art students and artists paid no charge, all other visitors paid a 25 cent admission fee or bought a season pass for 50 cents.15 By comparison, a pound of coffee cost around 10 cents at the time.16 More than 8,000 people attended. The exhibition, held in 1858, received rave reviews in the leading art journal, the Crayon, and in the New York Times.17 The Crayon advised its readers to purchase modern European pictures, such as those in the Belmont collection. After the successful exhibition of his pictures at the National Academy of Design, Belmont installed them in his home and new gallery space attached to his home at 109 Fifth Avenue at Eighteenth Street. His gallery, which had its own separate entrance at 4 East Eighteenth Street, became the foremost private art gallery in New York.18  August and Caroline Belmont then opened their private gallery for charitable events. Each time the exhibition was covered in the press. In 1864, as a supplement to the Metropolitan Fair in aid of the Sanitary Commission, the Belmonts opened their private gallery to the public for six

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days and for an admission fee of one dollar.19 Three years later, they opened it for another charitable fund-raiser, the Southern Relief Commission to aid the famine after the war ended.20 In 1870, the Belmonts opened it once again to raise money for the Sheltering Arms asylum for poor children.21 Like the Belmonts, the Johnstons allowed visitors into their personal gallery, built over a stable at the back of their marble mansion on Thursday afternoons.22 The mansion stood at Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street, ten blocks south of the Belmont home.23 One reporter called the Johnston collection “the most important private collection of Art-works in the United States”; it was also opened to the broader public a few days a week in winter.24 Additionally, Johnston invited American painters to his home once a year to see the paintings.25 Knoedler, Avery, and various male American artists and collectors signed Johnston’s visitor books.26 By the time Johnston’s collection was auctioned off in December 1876, it was well-known due to private viewings, loans, and press coverage. Earlier that year Johnston’s collection hung at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the Centennial Loan Exhibition. New York’s Centennial Loan Exhibitions, art historian Kimberly Orcutt rightly argued, celebrated New York City’s collectors.27 Belmont opened his private gallery to the public from June 19 to 22 and again from October 10 to 13 as one of the three New York City Centennial Loan Exhibitions held in conjunction with the great exhibition held in Philadelphia. All proceeds were divided between the cash-strapped National Academy of Design and Metropolitan Museum of Art. In competition with the international Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, the Independent boasted that “New York offers a really better display of works of art of the highest order than can be seen at the great show on the banks of the Schuylkill.”28 Harper’s Bazaar echoed the sentiment, effusing that “[p]robably there has never been opened to the public in this country a collection of such rare excellence, almost every picture being a masterpiece,” and reported that “a vast crowd availed themselves of the unusual opportunity [to see Belmont’s collection], and those who did not go must regret it.”29 Johnston was president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the time of the Centennial Exhibition and installed his collection at the museum for the 1876 Centennial Loan Exhibition. The exhibition took place from June 23 to November 10. Johnston’s sale was held in December 1876. As Kimberly Orcutt observed, Johnston and Avery both helped organize the Centennial Loan Exhibitions, so

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the placement of Johnston’s collection in the museum was not disinterested.30 It certainly received excellent publicity, as over 150,000 people attended New York’s Centennial Loan Exhibitions at the museum, the National Academy of Design, and the Belmonts’ private gallery. It was a testament to the collectors who organized the exhibitions and whose works, grouped by collector, were on display at the two primary art institutions and at a leading private collection in New York City. Catharine Wolfe and Cornelia (Mrs. A. T.) Stewart were among the lenders to the Centennial Loan Exhibition held at the National Academy of Design. An anonymous New York Times reviewer waxed poetic on the four pictures Wolfe lent. He or she suggested that Wolfe’s collection “was perhaps the most notable” in the exhibition and praised Wolfe’s beneficent contributions. She sent Gabriel Max’s The Last Token: A Christian Martyr (Figure 4.19), Jules Breton’s Church Pardon in Brittany, Thomas Couture’s Day Dreaming, and Emile Van Marcke’s Landscape and Cattle. The author continued: “there is one picture that appeals to the artistic mind [Couture’s], one that appeals to the religious emotions [Breton’s], one that touches the heart and compels to tears [Max’s], and one full of exuberant sympathy with external nature [Van Marcke’s]” and credited Wolfe for her choice selections.31 The most admired all around was Gabriel Max’s Last Token, a “heartrending and tear-compelling picture,” for which the author offered three different narratives.32 Cornelia Stewart sent seven paintings to the National Academy of Design. Pollice Verso (Figure  5.1) and Chariot Race, both by Gérôme, were the star attractions from her collection.33 According to the Evening Post, they were “masterworks in every sense of the term.”34 A New York Times reviewer regretted that Stewart did not lend her American landscape painting, Golden Hour, by William Hart.35 Another wished she had loaned more, but had to be satisfied that “she has liberally sent some of her choicest artistic possessions.”36 These two reviewers indicated that they were already familiar with the extent of her collection. Whereas collectors and art dealers directed the Centennial Loan Exhibitions, artists led by James Carroll Beckwith, William Merritt Chase, and J. Alden Weir among others, curated the Pedestal Loan Exhibition.37 Held in 1883 at the National Academy of Design, the Pedestal Loan Fund Exhibition raised funds for the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World. John Wolfe, John Taylor Johnston, and August Belmont were named honorary vice-presidents of

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Figure 5.1  Jean-Léon Gérôme, Pollice verso, 1872, oil on canvas, 40 × 58 in. (97.5 × 146.7 cm), Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ, formerly Alexander T. Stewart collection. Source: commons.wikimedia.org.

the Pedestal Fund Loan Exhibition, although they did not lend paintings or have input on selections.38 However, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe lent ten paintings, including Jean-Jacques Henner’s Listening Nymph and Meissonier’s A General and His Aide-de-Camp (1869).39 The lack of the usual works such as those in the major collections drew criticism and disappointed some members of the public. Mariana Van Rensselaer reported that “[t]he most famous collections of the city, such as those of Messrs. Astor and Belmont, of the two Vanderbilts [William H. and Cornelius], of Mrs. A. T. Stewart, and of the late Robert L. Stuart, were not drawn upon at all.”40 The committee tried but failed to secure Millet’s Sower (Figure  4.7) from the William H. Vanderbilt collection, “which would have been the star of the exhibition,” but that was only one work.41 The expectation that those who lent works in 1876 would again be called upon to lend in 1883 indicated that the private collectors had succeeded in becoming well-known, even “famous” according to Van Rensselaer. Their noted absence as lenders attested to their significance in the art world.

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Journals and Newspapers Journals and newspapers played a vital role in shaping positive images of the collectors and their collections. Periodicals provided extensive coverage of Gilded Age picture rush collecting. In addition to reporting on individual art collections, periodicals provided readers with basic information on loans, auctions, sales results, and art exhibitions. The sparse number of antebellum journals, such as the short-lived Crayon (1855–1861), increased after the Civil War to include leading periodicals such as the Art Amateur (1879–1903), Art Journal (New York) (1875–1887), the Collector (1889–1897), and the Studio (1883–1894).42 Both journals and newspapers such as the New York Times (1851–present) and New York Tribune (1841–1966) reported on collections and auctions. Articles devoted to individual collections were published as early as the 1850s with August Belmont’s collection.43 By 1864, a writer for the Albion began his or her article by saying “We have so often spoken in these columns of the above-named [Belmont] Collection of modern Pictures, as by far the best in the United States, that any commendation or allusion to its contents would now be superfluous.”44 Belmont’s collection continued to be profiled and every loan exhibition was reported in the press. Fifteen years later, Fuller-Walker profiled Belmont’s collection in a two-part series for the Aldine.45 Continuous press coverage kept the private collection in the public eye. In 1870, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s former student, American artist and critic Eugene Benson, wrote a series of articles on European art in American collections. In addition to drawing attention to artists, Benson drew favorable attention to the collectors in his essays for Putnam’s Monthly.46 In these articles, Benson credited the collectors, including August Belmont and John Taylor Johnston, as well as the dealers Knoedler and Schaus, with acquainting the American public with the works of Gérôme and Meissonier in particular.47 For example, Belmont’s collection included a picture by Gérôme and two “admirable” works by Meissonier.48 Benson claimed that his former teacher was “the most successful artist now living in France.”49 Although Benson admired the Belmont collection, he wrote that the collection of John Taylor Johnston was “wholly modern” and “second to no gallery in New York.”50 Again, he felt that one of the best pictures in the Johnston collection was by Gérôme, the Death of Caesar (Figure 3.2).51 Also among the best were Bouguereau’s Going to the Bath (Figure 5.2) “a beautiful and celebrated picture,”

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Figure 5.2  William Bouguereau, chromolithograph after Going to the Bath, c. 1865. Source: commons.wikimedia.org. Location of original 39 × 29 1/2 in. (99 × 74.9 cm), from the John Taylor Johnston and later William H. Vanderbilt collections is unknown. See a reduction of Going to the Bath, c. 1865, oil on canvas, 21 3/4 × 18 in. (55.2 × 45.7 cm), Gift of Mrs. Theodora Willard Best, St. Johnsbury Athenaeum, St. Johnsbury, VT.

and two works by Meissonier, Soldier at Cards, dated 1860, and Marshall Saxe and Staff, dated 1866.52 Belmont’s first-rate collection had been outdone by the Johnston collection. Johnston’s collection was still fondly remembered after its sale in 1876, the year of A. T. Stewart’s death. Alexander T. Stewart’s successful dry goods store overshadowed his collecting in the news while he was alive. However, the press occasionally reported on

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Stewart’s art before his death. In 1869, the New York Observer and Chronicle speculated that he would have a museum attached to his newly built marble mansion at Thirty-Fourth Street and Fifth Avenue.53 He did not, and the press only received occasional glimpses of the artworks inside. His 1870 purchase of Adolphe Yvon’s large mural, Genius of America (Figure 4.1), was one of the few works to initially attract press attention, although much of it negative.54 More attention was paid by 1875. That year, Fuller-Walker, author of an Aldine review, gave a lengthy, glowing review of Stewart’s “largest, best and most costly gallery of works of art.” Following a detailed description of the art gallery itself, FullerWalker briefly discussed works by American and European artists. Notably, Stewart’s collection included Edouard Dubufe’s Prodigal Son, “a work familiar to all,” presumably through engravings.55 A reviewer for Appleton’s Journal gained admission to view two paintings by Mariano Fortuny, whose works were known primarily through etchings.56 Aside from these few rare outside visits and limited guests, including August Belmont and Cornelius Vanderbilt, Stewart’s art collection was largely kept from public view while he was alive. The Stewart collection garnered much positive press attention after his death in 1876. He reportedly died soon after retiring from a small dinner party of thirteen who dined in the mansion and spent an hour in the art gallery.57 The collection remained in the house with his widow, Cornelia, and continued to attract the press. She seemed to have been more willing to share than her husband. Harper’s Weekly profiled the gallery in 1879.58 Several years later, photographs of the Stewarts’ gallery were included in Artistic Houses (Figure  3.5), when Cornelia Stewart still lived in the mansion.59 The 1887 auction sale of the collection finally allowed the curious to view the works in person. Collis Huntington began attracting press coverage for his art collecting around the same time as Stewart. He began collecting in 1867 and maintained residences in San Francisco and in New York with picture collections. One of his first major commissions was Albert Bierstadt’s Donner Lake from the Summit, which was noted in an 1872 article on Bierstadt.60 His presence at New York auctions as well as his auction purchases made the news. Huntington was one of the few men listed as present at the Albert Spencer sale in 1879.61 In 1886, he purchased Vibert’s The Missionary’s Adventures (Figure  3.4) at the Mary Jane Morgan sale for $25,500, “after a sharp contest” with his San Francisco neighbor, Charles Crocker.62 A subheading of the James Stebbins auction sale held in 1889 stated “Collis P. Huntington Secured Meissonier’s ‘The Game Lost’ for $26,300

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after a Lively Contest.”63 Over time his press coverage progressed from mentions to purchases to headlines. The press also commented on collectors’ connoisseurship. One reported that Huntington, through his own study, “acquired a degree of real knowledge of books and of the fine arts far beyond that of most professional men. Probably there is not a better amateur judge of painting and statuary in the United States than Mr. Huntington.”64 Obituaries sometimes offered a glimpse into personal connections with particular paintings. One of Huntington’s favorite pictures, a Knaus engraving of an old man called I Can Wait, hung outside his San Francisco office in the Mills building. Huntington found it sad that such a patient, submissive man be treated as an inferior. Somehow Huntington related to it.65 In a letter to Luigi Cesnola regarding a loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Huntington confessed that he did not want to lend his paintings by Ludwig Knaus: “As for the Knaus pictures, I would very much like to loan the Museum some, but I confess they are so much company for us in our own home that I don’t like to part with them even for a month.”66 An obituary notice recalled that “[i]t was Mr. Huntington’s custom after breakfast to go into the art gallery and spend an hour with his pictures. There he received the men he wanted to talk to intimately. Nothing pleased him better than to find some one [sic] with a soul for color and art to whom he would show the treasures of his collection.”67 According to contemporaries, Vanderbilt’s collection was considered to be the most important American collection (see cover image). When French author and art critic Émile Durand-Gréville traveled to the United States in 1886, his account of the private art galleries were published in the Studio and in the Connoisseur.68 He called Vanderbilt’s collection “the most celebrated of all [. . .] by the number of its pictures, by its eclectic character, and by the assemblage of a considerable number of famous works, gives the most favourable idea of the taste of the new American millionaires.”69 Avery commented in 1884 that Vanderbilt had the most extensive and worthy American art collection in the United States (which Avery and Lucas had helped form).70 Several small catalogs of the collection were published, and the New York Times and the Collector also listed the contents of the collection.71 Vanderbilt’s collection was still touted as comprising “artistic landmarks of the world” as late as 1890.72 American collectors attracted attention abroad through their collections of French art and took their pride of place alongside French aristocrats, the Luxembourg gallery, and the Louvre. By owning and lending Salon works, American collectors could consider themselves as cultured as European

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collectors. American names were included in the Paris Salon catalogs as lenders. For example, James Stebbins lent a “famous Gérôme,” L’Éminence grise to the Salon of 1874, where it was awarded a medal of honor, and again to the Universal Exposition of 1878, only increasing its fame and the owner’s prestige.73 A. T. Stewart lent Gérôme’s Collaboration (Corneille and Molière), to the Salon of 1874, and Cornelia Stewart lent Meissonier’s Petit poste de grand’garde [Outpost of the Grand Guard] to the Universal Exposition of 1878.74 Catharine Lorillard Wolfe lent Cabanel’s Shulamite (Figure 4.18) to the Salon of 1876.75 Lending to the Salon by American dealers and collectors continued into the early 1880s, with collectors’ names noted in the Salon catalogs. Despite all the positive reputation-building notices, not all press coverage of art collections was flattering. In the early 1880s, the art-loving public viewed speculation in a negative light. An 1884 editorial in the Nation bluntly pointed out the fact that speculation, which remained politely hidden elsewhere, existed in art: “the millionaire: he wants to add to his collection and wait for a rise.”76 Several years later an Art Review columnist remarked scornfully that some even collected art “due to vanity, to mere rivalry, to a desire for notoriety and a yearning to demonstrate the size of the buyer’s bank account.”77 There was also negative press from abroad. French critic Octave Mirbeau wrote a caustic rant against the Salon and its artists in Le Figaro in 1887. He sarcastically noted that prices for artists such as Bouguereau, Cabanel, Meissonier, and Vibert were going down, in part because A. T. Stewart was dead, and Vanderbilt was no longer paying high prices (he was also dead), suggesting that these two major collectors had kept prices artificially high.78 This was very likely true, as their collections were among the most publicized even after their deaths. However, positive press still outweighed any negative references. The collections were more often considered to be cultural and educational investments.

Collection and Auction Catalogs Collection and auction catalogs served as another source of advertising and documentation. In 1879, William Henry Vanderbilt published one catalog for his collection when it hung throughout his townhouse at 459 Fifth Avenue at Fortieth Street (just six blocks from the Stewart mansion at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-Fourth Street). Later, between 1882 and 1886, he published three more guides for the collection where it was displayed in a separate gallery

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with a public entrance at 640 Fifth Avenue and Fifty-First Street.79 He also loaned works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.80 Critics and commentators incorrectly believed that William H. Vanderbilt would found a public art gallery that would instruct and benefit the public.81 Instead, his collection reached others through loans and catalogs. Morgan published a small collection catalog in 1884 based on Vanderbilt’s catalogs.82 Neither August Belmont nor Catharine Wolfe published their own collection catalogs. Belmont’s collection was documented only for the various charitable openings of the collection. Huntington did not publish a collection catalog until 1896, and by that time Collis and Arabella had already begun collecting Old Master paintings.83 Gérôme’s student, Earl Shinn, who wrote under the pseudonym, Edward Strahan, authored Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and Collection (1883–1884), a deluxe multivolume, illustrated collection catalog.84 Strahan studied under Gérôme in Paris just prior to the 1867 Universal Exposition and became the most prolific American chronicler of French art. The oversized, heavy volumes included catalog entries for many of the paintings, but perhaps more valuable are the pictures of Vanderbilt’s private art gallery. These few images of his gallery provide posterity a glimpse at one of the most famous art collections of the Gilded Age picture rush. Vanderbilt’s last catalog, a small one with no illustrations, appeared in 1886, the year Durand-Gréville visited and the year of Vanderbilt’s death. Deluxe books such as Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and Collection were published with photogravures and engravings printed on high-quality papers. A limited number of copies, usually 500 or 1,000, were printed and sold by subscription, which limited the readership to interested parties, primarily collectors. An illustrated tome with beautiful engravings could cost over a hundred dollars. In his early collecting days, Henry Clay Frick paid $400 for a four-volume deluxe Japan edition of Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and Collection (1883–1884), and spent another $100 for twenty individual etchings after Vanderbilt’s paintings.85 Strahan authored perhaps the most important book of this period, Art Treasures of America, which chronicled the rapidly built collections across the United States. The Stewart, Wolfe, and Belmont collections appeared in the first volume, Huntington’s in the second, and Vanderbilt’s in the third.86 Unfortunately Johnston’s collection had already been sold before the project began. It surely would have been included had it been intact. The books included line drawings and photogravures. Strahan described, and sometimes criticized, works in the collections. At the end of each chapter, Strahan provided a list of the artworks in the featured collector’s possession. Various versions of Art Treasures of America

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were available between fifteen dollars (popular edition) and three hundred dollars (Edition de luxe).87 Major collectors, such as Cornelia (Mrs. A. T.) Stewart and Catharine Wolfe, owned copies.88 Overall, the volumes celebrated the great Gilded Age picture rush and its collectors. Strahan identified foreign masterpieces in each of his publications, both his own selections and the public’s choices. He considered every painting highlighted in his books on the Centennial Exhibition and the 1878 Universal Exposition to be masterpieces.89 Many American collectors owned these paintings or reductions of them (the same subject but in smaller dimensions). For example, Strahan identified Gérôme’s best works, all in US collections, including Death of Caesar (Figure 3.2), Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant, Pollice verso, and Chariot Race (Circus Maximus), particularly in Art Treasures of America, and added that Gérôme himself selected Pollice Verso and Ave Caesar, moritori te saluant as his best works.90 For Meissonier, not surprisingly, he selected 1807, Friedland (Figure 3.6) in the Stewart collection as a masterpiece and admired Meissonier’s Chess Players in the August Belmont collection.91 This painting was one of Meissonier’s typical interior period scenes, painted with his characteristic high quality in the rich use of color, the interior light and the “breadth of style” that in a small canvas “make the painter-spectator sigh with baffled envy.”92 Strahan’s other choices for masterpieces were all from US collections. He reserved high praise for paintings in the Stewart collection: Bouguereau’s Return from the Harvest, Newborn Lamb, and Homer and His Guide, two rustic subjects and a history picture.93 He also identified as masterpieces Bonheur’s Horse Fair (Figure 3.1), and Merle’s Shakespearean pairs, Hamlet and Ophelia (Figure 4.12) and Benedick and Beatrice as well as Toulmouche’s Serious Book.94 From Catharine Wolfe’s collection he named Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps’ Night Watch in Smyrna, Alexandre Bida’s drawing, Massacre of the Mamelukes, and Thomas Couture’s Soap Bubbles.95 Simple and deluxe catalogs accompanied loan and auction exhibition and prominently listed collectors’ names.96 Auction catalogs also provided a source of documentation for collections just prior to their dispersals. Deluxe illustrated editions accompanied blockbuster auctions such as the A. T. Stewart and Mary Jane Morgan picture sales. Cornelia Stewart’s collection appeared in a deluxe, illustrated catalog, with only A. T. Stewart’s name.97 Three catalogs priced for various budgets helped further publicize the Stewart collection before its dispersal.98

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Art History Surveys and Dictionaries The art history surveys published in the United States mirror the growth of private collections during the Gilded Age picture rush. A few art history surveys and dictionary-style books appeared in the late 1870s when collections had formed. The pace of publications increased in the 1880s when collections were established and dispersed, but then slowed down in the 1890s as the Gilded Age picture rush waned. Early authors focused primarily on works in American collections. Clement’s and Hutton’s, Artists of the Nineteenth Century and Their Works (1885); Champlin’s and Perkins’s Cyclopedia of Painters and Paintings (1886–1887); and Clara Stranahan’s A History of French Painting (1888) all gave significant weight to art market information.99 They preceded the popular Bénézit Dictionary of Artists still consulted today for its artists’ biographies and market information. American dictionaries included US collectors’ names and art market information such as important sales and sample prices as an integral part of the entries. With the inclusion of their names in the first art history surveys, the collectors as well as their collections were inscribed into the history of art. Formats ranged from simple dictionaries to deluxe coffee table style books. These books cost around three dollars for dictionaries and twenty-five dollars and higher for deluxe volumes, which was out of range for the lower classes. An unskilled manual worker at this time earned about five dollars per week.100 Before he made his fortune, Collis Huntington earned seven dollars a month working on a Connecticut farm.101 Monthly rent cost around ten dollars a month. A book such as Clara H. Stranahan’s dictionary-style History of French Painting geared toward students cost five dollars.102 Artists of the Nineteenth Century and Their Works, an ambitious general dictionary with 2,050 entries, also cost five dollars.103 It covered modern artists from France, Germany, and other schools as well as summarized their art academies. In addition, it included US sales and collectors’ names and art market information for most artists. For example, under Hugues Merles’ entry, Clement and Hutton listed his work in the August Belmont and William T. Walters collections among others, and the sale price of his painting, Chasing the Butterfly, in the 1876 John Taylor Johnston sale.104 At the end of the ten-page section on Meissonier, Stranahan listed over fifty works in US collections, including those that had been in the sales of A. T. Stewart, John Taylor Johnston, Mary Jane Morgan, and George Seney.105

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In Cyclopedia of Painters and Paintings, Champlin and Perkins attempted to be more comprehensive, straightforward, and authoritative than Artists of the Nineteenth Century and Their Works, akin to the present-day Grove Dictionary of Art or Oxford Art Dictionary.106 Their heavily illustrated dictionary included a selection of Renaissance through contemporary art. Subscriptions for the fourvolume set cost twenty-five dollars.107 Brief entries included honors, a list of bestknown works, and American collectors or repositories. For example, Cabanel’s entry included a long list of his work in US collections such as those of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, William Walters, Collis Huntington, William Vanderbilt, and others.108 The artwork entry for Circus Maximus reads “Jean Léon Gérôme, Mrs. A. T. Stewart, New York,” followed by a description and its reference in Art Treasures of America.109 The American collectors’ names remained closely connected to the artist and title of the works. They became an integral part of the encyclopedia as they had with museum donations and gallery loans. Rosa Bonheur’s entry has a very long list under “Works in the United States” owned by August Belmont, William Henry Vanderbilt, Mrs. A. T. Stewart, William T. Walters, and others.110 Clarence Cook’s deluxe three-volume Art and Artists of Our Time (1888) was published in the same year as Stranahan’s History of French Art.111 A six-volume version in 1900 cost $28.50.112 Cook was a well-known author, art editor, and prolific American critic concerned with education and morality.113 A print collector, he owned original etchings by Meissonier and etchings after Gérôme’s Moorish Bath and Bouguereau’s Pet Lamb (probably Newborn Lamb from the A. T. Stewart Collection). He also collected etchings after Millet, Israëls, Benjamin-Constant, Henner, Bonnat, and Barbizon artists.114 Cook noted that most of Gérôme’s best works were in US collections, including Duel after the Masquerade (Figure 2.1).115 Cook admired two of Cabanel’s paintings in New York, a portrait of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe (Figure 4.10), and the Shulamite, from Wolfe’s collection and mentioned Bouguereau’s Charity and Breton Brother and Sister (Figure  5.3) from her collection. This was perhaps in deference to Wolfe and her generous bequest to the Metropolitan Museum of Art which had just taken place. Various other texts identified foreign masterpieces in US collections. American artist Theodore Robinson identified Corot’s Ville d’Avray from the Catharine Wolfe collection as his best.116 Meissonier’s name was closely connected to the US art market. In One Hundred Crowned Masterpieces of Modern Painting, author J. E. Reed unequivocally assured collectors of Meissonier’s

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Figure 5.3  William Bouguereau, Breton Brother and Sister, 1871, oil on canvas, 50 7/8 × 35 1/8 in. (129.2 × 89.2 cm), Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Bequest of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, 1887, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org.

paintings that the value of the work would not depreciate. Reed identified as masterpieces Meissonier’s The Sign Painter from the Catharine Wolfe collection; Vibert’s The Missionary’s Adventures (Figure 3.4) “a sermon of force and power” from the Huntington collection; and Meissonier’s 1807 Friedland (Figure  3.6) and Knaus’s Children’s Party (Figure  4.2) from the Stewart collection.117 Great Modern Painters, authored by various French critics, for example, mentioned Jules-Joseph Lefebvre’s painted ceiling for William H. Vanderbilt’s Fifth Avenue mansion, and works for Catharine Lorillard Wolfe.118

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Another deluxe book, Louis Viardot’s Masterpieces of French Art, included a few select American collectors, notably William H. Vanderbilt, among European aristocrats, the Salon, the Louvre, and the Luxembourg Gallery.119 One thousand American subscribers received Masterpieces of French Art. Henry Clay Frick owned a copy, and Collis Huntington owned an Imperial edition and a smaller edition of Viardot’s Masterpieces of French Art. Volume one of Viardot’s book included Meissonier’s works from the William H. Vanderbilt collection and one from a Philadelphia collection, and volume two includes three other works from New York collections. Most works were from the Salon, the Luxembourg Museum, the Louvre, or from French private collections. Viardot noted that most of Toulmouche’s best paintings hung in the United States.120 These art history surveys and dictionaries provide evidence that collectors’ names and the artworks they possessed became an integral part of the narrative in the US.

Prints and Reproductions How would artworks reach the masses if the pictures could be viewed only in wealthy collectors’ homes, loan exhibitions, auction houses, or in sparsely illustrated surveys and dictionaries? They reached the general population through photographic reproductions and prints. Inexpensive reproductions were readily available all across the United States as photographs, individual prints, and illustrations within journals and magazines. Prints cost anywhere from 15 cents to several dollars. US Commissioner of Labor, Carroll D. Wright, wrote that “[t]he cheap prints that adorn the humblest homes have an uplifting influence, and must be considered as positive evidence of the existence of an aspiration to something better.” He continued, “Cheap reproductions of artworks help to educate and beautify the lives of the masses of the people.”121 He cited as evidence an encounter he had while riding the elevated train in New York City. Sitting next to him, a workingclass shop girl intently read a 10 cent magazine. Glancing over her literature, Wright found that she was engrossed in reading an article about “works of our best artists, and in studying the engravings which accompanied it.”122 Delighted, Wright, of a higher social class, interpreted this encounter as successful trickle-down aesthetics.

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Photographs of artworks were readily available. In Clarence Cook’s preface to the Berlin Photographic Company’s trade catalog, he extolled photography’s economical means of reaching the general population. He wrote: [T]he reproduction by photography of works of art,—of pictures, statues, famous buildings, engravings—has vastly increased the pleasure of the world, opening up to the general public a domain that has been hitherto the almost exclusive property of a few to whom wealth and leisure give the key.

He credits photography for “disseminating valuable knowledge,” by bringing masterpieces from numerous collections to the average home.123 The company sold photographs ranging from the smallest (8 × 10 inches) for one dollar, to the largest (35 1/2 × 47 inches) for fifteen dollars. An 1886 article on home decorating from the San Francisco Chronicle reprinted in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle echoed Wright’s and Cook’s sentiment that reproductions made works widely available to the public. The author informed readers that for just one dollar, one could own reproductions of works by Meissonier, Vibert, Boulanger, Bouguereau, Leighton, Gerome [sic] and others of equal fame [. . .] Thus for $20 a young couple can furnish their parlor with a gallery of art such as thousands of dollars could not have collected thirty years ago. The children will grow up with examples of correct taste and noble thoughts ever under their eyes. And if there is any truth in the old proposition that vice and true art cannot coexist, and that the contemplation of things of beauty is a better check to crime than all the sermons in the world, we may look forward to being followed when we pass away by a better and a purer generation [. . .] this shall be a better world to live in.124

This paragraph reflected the faith in art’s power to enhance public morality to the extent that it would not only improve generations to come, but also prevent crime! In addition to prints and photographs, inexpensive paintings sold anywhere between 45 cents and $3.50. By analyzing trade catalogs, art historian Saul Zalesch provided evidence that by the 1880s, all but the poorest bought cheap knockoff paintings all across the US.125 Many inexpensive oil paintings featured landscapes, as they were quicker to paint. Any visitor to a flea market today will likely find  some of these kinds of pictures, along with ubiquitous reproductions  of  Jean-François Millet’s peasants, especially The Angelus

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Figure 5.4  Jean-François Millet, The Angelus, painted between 1857 and 1859, oil on canvas, 21 7/8 × 26 in. (55.5 × 66 cm), Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. Source: commons.wikimedia.org.

(Figure  5.4), and Jean-Jacques Henner’s Fabiola (Figure  4.17), from Collis Huntington’s collection.126 Some picture peddlers attempted to sell such works by invoking well-known collectors’ names. An article in an 1889 issue of Harper’s Weekly stated that an auctioneer selling inexpensive paintings claimed that William H. Vanderbilt and A. T. Stewart (both deceased by this time) fought over the works he peddled.127 Additionally, toward the end of the century, public libraries hosted exhibitions, lent traveling pictures, and amassed collections of art and art reproductions for the public’s edification.128 Through these various means prints, photographs, inexpensive paintings, and loanable pictures, art reached a broad public. Assessing the extent to which these works reached and impacted the masses is an impossible task. However, paintings, prints, and photographs were widely available in the nineteenth century image economy which allowed people of various social classes to access art reproductions.

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Conclusion The art collections of seven leading collectors (Belmont, Johnston, Vanderbilt, Wolfe, Stewart, Morgan, and Huntington) highlighted in this chapter exemplified the close relationship in the media between the collector and his or her collection. A wide variety of printed media as well as private gallery openings, loan exhibitions, and auctions publicized the Gilded Age picture rush collections. Artworks were exhibited, documented, sold, and publicized. Prints, photographs, and inexpensive paintings after works in their collections further extended their reach to all but the poorest social class. The collectors’ names were closely tied to writing, whether a deluxe illustrated book, newspaper article, or art history survey. Collection and auction catalogs, often including illustrations, advertised collectors and artworks. Collectors were immortalized in art history surveys as well as in catalogs and in contemporary journals. More scholarly and educative than periodicals, art history surveys incorporated art market information as part of their entries, further validating the collectors and their art collections. Until the 1890s, nearly every survey, whether translated from French or written by American critics or artists, mentioned prominent collectors. Any discussion of Meissonier’s 1807, Friedland (Figure  3.6) inevitably included mention its owner, Stewart, and its price tag (even after it passed into the hands of Stewart’s executor, Judge Henry Hilton, who paid even more for it). Collectors and the artworks they owned both became part of US cultural history. The emphasis on collectors seemed self-congratulatory but also related to a lack of state-sponsored art collections. Private collectors were the only benefactors, and the availability of inexpensive reproductions helped educate the public through art. Authors and critics chose numerous late nineteenthcentury paintings from US collections as masterpieces. Reading these histories gives a more accurate overview of the late nineteenth-century art world. If one were to learn about late nineteenth-century painting by reading the selection of books mentioned in this chapter, a very different history emerges from the twentieth- and twenty-first century narratives of an art history survey text book. With much of the publicity written and circulated in reproductions, access to the works of art in person was limited. At a time when the fledgling Metropolitan Museum of Art had no permanent collection, loan collections

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there and at the National Academy of Design such as the Centennial Loan Exhibitions provided a means to view private works in public institutions. Private art galleries and loan exhibitions offered limited access, and collectors and dealers acted as curators who imparted knowledge to the visitor. Their private picture galleries offered select groups of people access to fine art. Then in 1887, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe donated her contemporary art collection to the fledgling Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Wolfe bequest occupied two adjacent galleries, called the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Gallery. Her collection, with French art at its core, became much more widely covered in the press after she donated it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. With European academic art then in the museum’s permanent collection, the works, and their benefactress, were validated in the institution, the subject of the next chapter.

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From Private Collection to Public Good: The Metropolitan Museum of Art [W]hat became of the French pictures swallowed by the great western Republic but never disgorged.1 —Anonymous, 1888

Many of the artworks from Gilded Age picture rush collections discussed in previous chapters would eventually become part of art museums’ permanent collections. The capitalist-philanthropists felt that a great city needed an art museum where art would serve an educational function. The institutions would symbolize cultural authority and provide a permanent, public repository for original artworks.2 Samuel Avery played a key role, as did John Taylor Johnston, Catharine Wolfe, William H. Vanderbilt, A. T. Stewart, and others. They, rather than the government, took responsibility for this aspect of education. Lamenting the US government’s lack of support for the arts, James Jackson Jarves, himself a collector, acknowledged that education in the United States rested with individual philanthropists rather than with the state, as in France. In 1870, he wrote: In America, where every initiative in education must be taken by individuals, it is absolutely certain that no steps to advance any branch of learning ever will be undertaken until there are found a sufficient number of persons of wealth and aesthetic culture willing to assume for the public the duty which it really owes to itself to do at once and thoroughly. Have we at this juncture enough of such disinterested individuals, of sufficient property and the right sort of training?3

Jarves questioned whether the postbellum period was indeed finally the moment at which money, education, and philanthropy converged. It was. New York City would finally have its first encyclopedic museum dedicated to art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art received its first permanent collection of modern art in 1887 with the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe bequest, followed closely by various other important bequests.

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art, chartered in 1870, less than three months prior to Jarves’s ruminations, opened to the public in 1872. It formed “for the purpose of establishing and maintaining [. . .] a Museum and library of art, of encouraging and developing the study of the fine arts, and the application of arts to manufactures and practical life, of advancing the general knowledge of kindred subjects, and, to that end, of furnishing popular instruction and recreation.”4 The Metropolitan Museum of Art became the foremost cultural institution in the nation’s leading city and intended to be a center of aesthetic and moral education. At the time, there was an absolute faith in the transformative educational power of museums. It was considered a morally uplifting civic space that also reflected national unity.5 The impetus for the museum’s founding began in Paris at a Fourth of July celebration in 1866, just prior to the 1867 Universal Exposition. Lawyer John Jay, who became president of the exclusive Union League Club, addressed the Americans present, including the US Commissioner to the Universal Exposition. Samuel P. Avery was not recorded as a guest, but he played a key role in the museum’s formation and in aspects of its functioning.6 Back in New York, Jay, Avery, and other members of the Union League Club art committee met to found an art museum.7 Avery served as the committee’s secretary.8 Although his name is not listed on the museum’s charter, Avery collaborated with his friends, co-founders Eastman Johnson, John F. Kensett, and John Taylor Johnston. Another co-founder was William J. Hoppin, who served as juror at the 1867 Paris Exposition and chair of the selection committee for the American fine arts section. Johnson, Kensett, Hoppin, and twenty-five sculptors, architects, collectors, and writers signed the museum’s charter.9 Johnston would serve as the museum’s first president.10 Alexander T. Stewart and Marshall O. Roberts were among the nine vice-presidents. Hoppin would serve as corresponding secretary, and later served on various committees. As of 1872 Avery served on the Board of Trustees and on the Loan Exhibition Committee. William H. Vanderbilt, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, Collis Huntington, and Johnston were Patrons, the highest membership level. Hoppin and John Wolfe were Fellows in Perpetuity; Avery and William Schaus were Fellows for Life.11 Various collectors contributed funds to get the museum started. John Taylor Johnston contributed $10,000, and A. T. Stewart and William T. Blodgett each gave $5,000. Catharine Wolfe gave $2,500. August Belmont, however, refused to give funds as he did not believe the museum could succeed without state funding.12 The museum did succeed and began accumulating a permanent

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collection with gifts, donations, and purchases. In 1871 it acquired Blodgett’s collection of 174 Old Master paintings, mainly seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings, and in 1877 added the Luigi Palma di Cesnola Cypriot antiquities to its halls. Avery loaned, then sold, his collection of Asian porcelains to the museum in 1879. Yet it possessed no substantial permanent collection of contemporary European (or American) art. After the Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded, Avery continued working for the museum acting informally behind the scenes as general advisor, art agent, curator, and art school manager until his death. He held no title other than trustee and received no pay. A newspaper noted in 1879 that Avery’s “knowledge, judgment, and correct business principles have caused him to be often called upon as an expert in various ways.”13 On his annual trips to Europe, Avery worked both for himself and for the museum. Foreign dealers pursued Avery to buy art for the fledgling institution, but unbeknownst to them, the museum had no substantial acquisition budget.14 And knowing these dealers’ sometimes shifty motives, Avery declined to purchase Old Master paintings. Instead, he dealt with artists directly as well as through reputable European dealers. His service to the museum was not entirely disinterested on his part. Eventually works by these artists would enter the museum through Avery’s efforts. Without an acquisition budget, Avery turned to collectors to try and fill the museum galleries with loans and donations of contemporary European art— Jarves’s “disinterested individuals, of sufficient property and the right sort of training.” Loans came in, but Avery’s endeavors to acquire a permanent collection for the museum failed. His earliest efforts involved John Taylor Johnston’s collection. According to The Sun, Johnston “was one of the first of New York citizens to show a broad and generous cultivation in the matter of the fine arts, and the combined discretion and good taste, with which he amassed his pictures and other works of art.”15 Johnston was also president of the museum, so it would have been a grand gesture for him to donate his collection of contemporary art. However, an economic depression necessitated the 1876 auction sale of Johnston’s collection.16 Avery organized the sale and wrote a brief introduction praising its quality and lamenting its dispersal. It read: Through the generosity of the owner the majority of [ . . . the paintings] have been for years freely exhibited in this and other cities of the Union. Many of the productions have a fame as master pieces in the art centres of the world; and the whole collection

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has been accepted by the best judges as one of the finest, if not the finest, most varied, and complete collection ever brought together on this continent. The writer of these lines having been a witness of the growth of the collection, can testify to the great care and liberality exercised by the collector [. . .] and many regrets caused by this dispersion will be mitigated by the fact that a wide distribution of them will be an ultimate benefit to the cause of art.17

Avery’s hopes were somewhat realized as a handful of Johnston’s works passed into other prominent collections, “an ultimate benefit to the cause of art.” Still none had entered into the Metropolitan Museum of Art at that time. In 1880, the museum moved to its new permanent location in Central Park, but was still bereft of contemporary art. Joseph Choate, a prominent lawyer and one of the museum’s founders, advised collectors “to convert [. . .] railroad shares and mining stocks [. . .] into the glorified canvas of the world’s masters, that shall adorn these walls [of the Metropolitan Museum of Art] for centuries.”18 Choate had uttered these words at the museum’s opening ceremony. In the ten years since its founding, the museum had acquired pictures and objects from various time periods, but private collectors still had not transferred their “glorified canvases” to the museum’s permanent collections. In lieu of a permanent contemporary art collection, the museum hosted various loan exhibitions. For example, in 1880, William Henry Vanderbilt reportedly telegraphed the trustees permission to borrow any ten pictures from his collection, to which Samuel Avery replied that they took the best.19 They borrowed paintings by Corot, Dupré, Diaz de la Peña, Charles Jacque, JulesJoseph Lefebvre, Jean-Baptiste Madou, Meyer van Bremen, Erskine Nicol, José Villegas, and Emile Van Marcke. Catharine Wolfe also lent pictures. Possibly responding to the same 1880 exhibition, a delighted reviewer proudly noted juxtapositions of paintings by French artists and American artists. A painting by Gérôme hung next to one by Eastman Johnson and another American painting, Henry Loop’s Oenone hung alongside Breton Brother and Sister (Figure  5.3) by “the ever-popular Bouguereau.”20 According to reviews of another loan exhibition, Cabanel’s Phaedra, a reduction of the artist’s Salon picture of 1880, and Joan of Arc, by his student, Jules Bastien-Lepage, attracted the most notice at that exhibition.21 Critics and commentators incorrectly believed that William H. Vanderbilt would found a public gallery for his collection that would instruct and benefit the public.22 Samuel P. Avery, Vanderbilt’s primary dealer, confidently assumed

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that the collection would enter the Metropolitan Museum of Art.23 Instead, when he died in 1885, Vanderbilt bequeathed a considerable sum of $100,000 to the museum, but not his art collection (worth much more).24 His youngest son, George Washington Vanderbilt II, inherited the pictures before he embarked on constructing his own grand residence, Biltmore.25 This disappointment may have spurred industrialist Andrew Carnegie to argue in his “Gospel of Wealth” against leaving wealth to one’s children, for just such reasons. Undoubtedly he had Vanderbilt in mind as well as others who held too tightly to their art treasures.26 Vanderbilt’s will led to general regret that he had not left his exemplary modern art collection to form a gallery.27 The collection remained in his mansion, where Durand-Gréville viewed it. It may still have been accessible as another catalog was printed in 1886. However, this gradual movement from private to public spheres served as a necessary step that ultimately led to works or collections donated to museums, where they would be more widely available.28 Ideally, the museum intended to be inclusive, a site of collective cultural ownership that would help define a national identity.29 It did not necessarily attain its goals right away. As John Ott argued, however, the museum remained an exclusive institution that offered Avery and collectors benefits such as free admission and transportation of loans.30 An 1879 article in the Art Amateur complained, prior to the museum’s move to Central Park, that the taxpaying public had no voice in the museum’s collections. The article continued, though, to absolve the trustees from blame. The author referred to the trustees as “highly esteemed gentlemen [. . .] whose motives cannot be questioned” and stated that they did not actively manage the museum.31 This was not entirely accurate. The trustees were responsible for keeping the museum closed on Sundays, when the working public could visit. It did not open on Sundays until 1891. The next section describes the Wolfe bequest, one of the collections in which the public had no voice.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s First Permanent Collection of Contemporary Art One collector, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, left her collection en bloc to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1887 along with funds for its care. Although her collection, hanging throughout her home, was less accessible than Johnston’s, Vanderbilt’s, or Walters’ galleries during her lifetime, it would now be available to the public indefinitely. Wolfe had supported the museum from its beginnings.

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She was the only woman of 106 subscribers who funded the museum in its infancy. A friend of the museum’s founders, William T. Blodgett and John Taylor Johnston, she supported the museum until her death and frequently lent to its exhibits.32 At last a lender had become a donor. Johnston, then president of the museum, received the notice of her bequest. Unmarried and childless, Wolfe was the sole heir of her parents’ fortunes. Her father, John David Wolfe, made his fortune in hardware and real estate and her mother, Dorothea Ann Lorillard, came from a wealthy slave-owning tobacco family. Wolfe followed in her philanthropic-minded father’s footsteps. Among his numerous charities for the poor, he also provided for educational institutions. He became the first president of the American Museum of Natural History and actively supported the New-York Historical Society.33 Wolfe’s collection was strong but ranked somewhat below the Vanderbilt, Walters, and Stewart collections. However, she seems to have formed her collection with the intention of eventually donating it to the museum.34 Her watercolor painting, Eugène-Louis Lami’s Interior of a Museum (Figure  6.1), with its crowded display, elegant setting, and finely dressed guests, foreshadowed her donation (and perhaps the kinds of visitors she expected). Her bequest included 143 paintings and watercolors along with a $200,000 endowment, twice the amount William H. Vanderbilt left to the museum a year earlier. Her endowment, called the Wolfe Fund, would maintain her art collection and afford for future purchases.35 Of the many charitable donations that benefitted from Wolfe’s will, her bequest to the Metropolitan Museum of Art attracted the most attention.36 Wolfe was widely praised for her munificence and for her foresight in leaving an endowment for the collection’s care and enhancement.37 Her unprecedented gesture resulted from a philanthropic effort to educate the public and improve taste, and this was how her large gift was perceived. In his eulogy, William Reed Huntington praised her “keen sense of personal responsibility” in the distribution of her wealth.38 The positive press surrounding her bequest may have served as an impetus for future donations. As stated expressly in her will, she intended the collection to serve an educative function. She gave her picture collection: with the desire and hope on my part that the same [her art collection] may be had, held, and exhibited by that Institution [Metropolitan Museum of Art] for the enjoyment and recreation of all who may frequent its rooms, and also with a view to the education and cultivation of the public taste for the fine arts.39

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Figure 6.1  Eugène-Louis Lami, Interior of a Museum, watercolor (recto); graphite (verso), 13 1/8 × 20 1/2 in. (33.4 × 52 cm), Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Bequest of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, 1887, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org.

Strahan documented and praised Wolfe’s collection in Art Treasures of America and profiled it in the Art Amateur.40 One reviewer boasted that she had one of the finest collections in the country with representations of works by the best modern artists.41 Her collection, according to another American reviewer, would “delight” and educate “the people.”42 A New York Times writer stated that her collection would benefit even the poorest visitors.43 Wolfe’s art collection helped the Metropolitan Museum of Art establish a new canon with the display and documentation of contemporary European artworks. Avery, along with Knoedler (Goupil & Co.), William Schaus, and a few other dealers helped form the collection, and he oversaw the collection’s relocation to the museum. Avery chaired a committee to handle the bequest. He worked closely with Johnston, artist Daniel Huntington, who was also a long-serving vice-president of the museum, and collector Darius O. Mills. Avery visited Wolfe’s mansion to gather information about the pictures to ease the transfer to the museum.44 The museum, however, nearly failed to acquire the collection. Wolfe’s executor, her cousin David Wolfe Bishop, refused to relinquish the collection

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until fireproof galleries specified in the will could house them. With that prerequisite, Avery and the committee worried that the museum would not actually acquire Wolfe’s pictures.45 The museum had no funding for fireproofing. Two other glitches kept the collection from the museum. Bishop wanted Daniel Huntington to paint copies of John David Wolfe’s portrait and Catharine Wolfe’s portrait (Figure 4.10) before relinquishing the original portraits.46 Additionally, because Wolfe had Bonnat’s Roman Girl at a Fountain attached to a cabinet in 1885, Bishop claimed it was furniture rather than part of the art collection. Prior to that, the painting hung in her library.47 While Avery fretted over the fireproofing and lack of funds, he also advised museum director Luigi Palma di Cesnola on relations with Bishop about the Bonnat painting and legal matters.48 Avery, Cesnola, and others worked diligently to solve all of the problems. To solve the fireproofing requirement, they had current galleries retrofitted.49 It was a temporary but satisfactory solution. However, the gallery remained empty as Bishop still would not release the pictures, and Avery worried that a fumbled bequest would embarrass the museum.50 Perceived mismanagement of the gift would also deter others from donating, but Bishop finally sent the pictures in mid-October.51 They hurried to prepare for the November opening and print a catalog for the exhibition. Avery pressed Cesnola to request Wolfe’s biography and provenance information to help educate visitors.52 Avery hastily wrote the handbook’s preface.53 Several months later, new fireproof galleries were built on the second floor named The Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Gallery (Figure 6.2).54 Despite some mixed reviews, the Wolfe pictures caused excitement.55 Her bequest “brought new hope and courage, thus proving valuable for its inspiration as for its intrinsic worth.”56 Ripley Hitchcock believed that the museum now owned “an instructive and fairly representative collection of modern art,” which would meet the demands of students.57 He mentioned that those who worked to created educational opportunities for the public were encouraged by such generosity. Such a bequest fulfilled the museum’s charter: “for the purpose of encouraging and developing the study of the fine arts, and the application of arts to manufactures and practical life, of advancing the general knowledge of kindred subjects, and, to that end, of furnishing popular instruction and recreation.”58 As an initial subscriber to the museum, Wolfe was undoubtedly familiar with its charter. She bequeathed a variety of genre, military, Orientalist, and literary scenes. Pictures by leading painters incited the usual praise. Commentators admired Gérôme’s Prayer in the Mosque (Figure  4.20) for its archaeological

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Figure 6.2  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Paintings Galleries, Room 17: The Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Gallery; View looking southwest, Photographed ca. 1907. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

detail and ethnological representation of Egyptians and considered it one of his best works in an American collection despite its Orientalist subject.59 Most contemporary American writers considered Gérôme’s antique scenes to be more significant than his Orientalist paintings.60 Cook and others acknowledged Bouguereau’s Breton Brother and Sister (Figure 5.3) as solidly characteristic of his works.61 The New York Times viewed the Wolfe collection as “a collection of great merit and value.”62 They listed the best works as Cabanel’s Shulamite (Figure  4.18), his much-admired portrait of Wolfe (Figure  4.10), Gérôme’s Prayer in the Mosque (Figure 4.20); Bouguereau’s Breton Brother and Sister (Figure  5.3); and Meissonier’s A General and His Aide-de-Camp.63 In addition, they acknowledged other important pictures as Weaning the Calves by Rosa Bonheur and Mont de Piéte (The Pawnbroker’s Shop [?]) by Mihaly Munkácsy, Bonnat’s Roman Girl at a Fountain and An Egyptian Peasant Woman and Her Child, Ludwig Knaus’s Holy Family, Jules-Joseph Lefebvre’s Graziella, and Pierre-Auguste Cot’s Storm (Figure 6.3). The Studio noted that

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many photographs of Knaus’s Holy Family and Gabriel Max’s The Last Token: A Christian Martyr (Figure 4.19) had been sold.64 In the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Gallery, Wolfe’s portrait by Cabanel hung at the head of the collection, and Huntington’s portrait of her father hung opposite hers. Because of the positioning of the portraits, one reviewer commented that Wolfe seemed to be holding a reception for her collection of masters.65 There also seems to be a moralistic value judgment equating the portrait’s beauty to the beauty of such a generous woman. Wolfe’s portrait drew admiration for its likeness, costume, and hand gestures.66 In Art Treasures of America (Wolfe owned a copy), Strahan considered her portrait an example of “the national character of a period.”67 A visitor felt Wolfe possessed “a firm nature written in every line of the countenance.”68 Clarence Cook admired the portrait but found Cabanel’s portrait of Napoleon III (a reduction of which Walters owned), superior to that of Wolfe’s.69 To the left of Wolfe’s portrait hung Meissonier’s A General and His Aidede-Camp, deemed “remarkable for the fine outdoor effects.”70 Meissonier’s The Painters Willem van de Velde the Younger and Adriaen van de Velde Studying a Painting on an Easel (Figure 6.4) drew admiration as a typical example of his excellent small works.71 This painting was “another little jewel,” “a gem,” and “one of his most highly esteemed paintings.”72 Writers seldom failed to mention the events behind this painting’s Paris sale in 1878, when Wolfe had acquired it for the hefty sum of $11,420.73 One reviewer responded that “[s]o perfect an example of Meissonier’s skill would surely bring a much larger price if offered for sale to-day.”74 Clarence Cook considered it one of the most important contemporary European paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.75 Others found it even more artistically valuable than Meissonier’s masterpiece 1807, Friedland (Figure 3.6).76 However well-intentioned, critics’ and collectors’ educational goals were not entirely realized. Some visitors failed to understand the pictures’ edifying meanings. A wry account of a Monday afternoon viewing “to witness the first effects of this educational and cultivating influence upon the philistine public, to behold from their very midst the dawn of its benign influences” gives a glimpse of visitors’ reactions.77 Visitor favorites, according to this Monday afternoon spectator, were Cot’s The Storm (Figure 6.3), Hans Makart’s Dream after the Ball, Merle’s Falling Leaves, Allegory of Autumn, Cabanel’s Shulamite (Figure  4.18), and Baron Gustavus Wappers’s Confidences. Of these, more afternoon crowds gathered before The Storm than in front of

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Figure 6.3  Pierre-Auguste Cot, The Storm, 1880, oil on canvas, 92 1/4 × 61 3/4 in. (234.3 × 156.8 cm), Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Bequest of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, 1887, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org.

the other favorites. Although the source for the painting is uncertain, many people believed it to depict a scene from Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s popular eighteenth-century novel Paul et Virginie. This youthful pair represented love in full bloom. A museum-goer eavesdropped on visitors’ conversations. One young girl, confused by the lightly clad young couple, wondered why they would run from rain when water would not ruin such thin garments. A mature woman

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admired the female figure’s “strength and fragility” and marveled at her lover’s eyes: “the most expressive things [ . . . she] had ‘ever seen.’” Her friend objected to the opposing paces of the pair. To her, the young man seemed to run too swiftly for his companion to keep up. Thus were recorded three different guests’ perspectives on Cot’s Storm. Most conversations, according to the eavesdropper, revolved around superficial rather than educational concerns.78 No one discussed literature.

Figure 6.4  Engraving by T. V. Desclaux after J. L. Ernest Meissonier, The Painters Willem van de Velde the Younger and Adriaen van de Velde Studying a Painting on an Easel. Source: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

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The same observer noticed that Gabriel Max’s The Last Token: A Christian Martyr (Figure  4.19) especially attracted the ladies and children. They stood baffled by the young martyr’s indifference to the close proximity of the wild beasts, a tiger, leopard, and hyena, as she looks up to see who threw a rose at her feet. A young woman remarked: “It is utterly absurd, don’t you know, for her to be so calm with those horrid creatures behind her!”79 The women missed the educational message of sacrifice. Last Token relates to Gérôme’s Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer, but Max emphasizes just one lovely young woman, presumably at the Colosseum. In Art Treasures of America, Strahan explained the “true” sentiment of the picture, that of divine love overcoming human love: ­ e will of bloody Rome will be wrought out fully, and before the rose shall Th wither, its dewy leaves shall be washed with her blood. And then this simple unknown girl, till now nameless, obscure, plebeian, will rise to be one of the princesses of the Church,—her name will be sung in canticles for two thousand years, her relics will work miracles, her grave will be sought from the corner of the world, her sharp agony will purchase an immortality of Christian renown.80

The visitors should have pondered the outcome and sacrifice rather than the immediate action to appreciate what another reviewer observed as “a religious poem, full of the most tender sentiment.”81 Additional literature explained the paintings’ meanings, but then as now, museum-goers would have to seek it out. Looking alone served a limited educative function, if visitors resembled the few above.

Meissonier’s 1807, Friedland, Bonheur’s Horse Fair, and Other Donations in 1887 Wolfe’s generous bequest and the fanfare surrounding it spurred on additional donations to the fledgling Metropolitan Museum of Art. Two further donations that year resulted from the A. T. Stewart collection sale held in March 1887. It was hoped that Stewart, who served as a vice-president of the museum from 1870–1874, would leave his collection to the public. Unfortunately, like William Henry Vanderbilt, he left it to family, his wife, Cornelia. When she died, it was sold. Cornelius Vanderbilt, William Henry’s son, purchased Bonheur’s Horse Fair (Figure  3.1), and Judge Henry Hilton, a carpet manufacturer, Stewart’s

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personal attorney and trustee of his estate, purchased Meissonier’s 1807, Friedland (Figure 3.6) at the sale.82 Both men then promptly donated the widely acknowledged masterpieces to the museum. Avery acted as agent for Hilton at the Stewart sale and also represented another friend and client, Cornelius Vanderbilt, who paid $53,000 for Rosa Bonheur’s Horse Fair. Avery likely encouraged the donations. Tax breaks did not yet exist at this time, so the motivation to donate provided no financial savings. Bonheur’s Horse Fair had been famous since its first exhibition at the Paris Salon of 1853. Its fame only increased when dealer Ernest Gambart toured it in the United States.83 Shortly after the paintings entered the collection, Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly showed well-dressed admirers and a female copyist in front of the Horse Fair (Figure 6.5). This image serves as visual evidence of the picture’s educational benefit for young artists and for the three generations of visitors surrounding her. In a letter to President John Taylor Johnston, Hilton said he gave Meissonier’s painting to the museum in Stewart’s memory “to the end that it might permanently belong to and be enjoyed by the public.”84 Hilton’s donation of this famous painting from the Stewart collection also indicated its significance. Avery, who was on the Board of Trustees, received the painting on behalf of the museum, and Johnston expressed gratitude for the generous gifts.85 Writers unanimously applauded the addition of 1807, Friedland to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As it had made headlines when Stewart purchased it for $60,000, the painting made headlines again for its costliness. Avery purchased the picture on Hilton’s behalf for $66,000, although now writers focused more on its important destination.86 Even influential critic Mariana Griswold van Rensselaer, who claimed the masterpiece had actually been “greatly overpraised,” was extremely pleased and grateful that this painting, exceptional in the artist’s oeuvre, was now on public view.87 The painting had already become as legendary as the artist himself almost a decade before Strahan had written about it. In 1871, curiosity about the picture had led an unnamed correspondent for the New York Times to visit Meissonier in his Poissy studio.88 The correspondent described in detail Meissonier’s hospitality, his studio and its contents, including costumes of all kinds. He stressed the admirably staid, work-like atmosphere of the studio and noticed the many paintings and wax models of horses Meissonier had painstakingly created with equal care as studies for 1807, Friedland. The correspondent also remarked on Meissonier’s uncanny resemblance to Napoleon I before describing the great painting as if it were a page in a history book.89

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Figure 6.5  Copyist in front of Rosa Bonheur’s Horse Fair, 1889. Source: Ripley Hitchcock, “New York’s Art Museum,” Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly 28, no. 6 (December 1889): 674.

Novelist Henry James also ruminated on the worth of Meissonier’s 1807, Friedland.90 He determined that the picture involved a great deal of labor and skill, and was proud that the United States was able to acquire one of “the highest prizes of the game of civilization.”91 The painting, according to James, deserved close and careful analysis, and the parts were even more interesting than the whole.92 Strahan exclaimed that one could almost hear the troops cry “Long live the Emperor!”93 For him, the clear depiction of camaraderie between the contemplative general and his triumphant troops made this painting

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a masterpiece. Meissonier reportedly spent fifteen laborious years on this magnificent painting, and Americans were impressed by the hard work.94 With this painting, Strahan echoed James’ sentiment that “America has secured an artistic trophy.”95 This acquisition was a cultural victory for the United States. Several other important donations of contemporary European art entered the permanent collection shortly after the Wolfe bequest. Collector George I. Seney and dealer William Schaus also donated several European and American paintings.96 Two days after Wolfe’s donations, Seney donated Henri Lerolle’s large, magnificent painting, The Organ Rehearsal (Figure  6.6), which he purchased from Goupil’s. Lerolle’s painting was “[t]he chief attraction” at the museum in Goupil’s winter exhibition prior to its donation.97 Another critic said, “Lerolle’s great picture” would be a “revolutionizing lift” for the museum.98 Seney also donated eleven others.99 Seney made his gift through Avery, and hoped the paintings would “contribute something to the pleasure and the instruction of the visitors at the museum.”100 Schaus donated Léon Lhermitte’s Grape Harvest, which he bought from the Paris Salon of 1884. He had not offered it at auction, although it was displayed at his gallery. From his own collection, Judge Hilton also gave Edouard Detaille’s Defense of Champigny.101 Within a few years, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe’s cousin, John Wolfe, donated his reduction of Cabanel’s famous Birth of Venus and Adolf Schreyer’s Battle Scene: Arabs Making a Detour. The original Birth of Venus belonged to Emperor Napoleon III and another reduction belonged to Henry Gibson, a Philadelphia collector. Avery wrote to museum president Henry Marquand, urging him to act quickly in informing the public of Wolfe’s generosity, hoping it would set an example for others. Avery, serving in yet another unofficial role as public relations specialist, felt that a few words from Marquand to the press would “have a good effect.”102 With all of these donations, the contemporary European painting collection grew rapidly.

­The Vanderbilt and Huntington Collections Avery’s involvement in enlarging the museum’s collection lasted throughout his lifetime. As chairman of the museum’s Committee on Paintings, Avery accepted donations, such as the first Impressionist paintings in the museum’s collection donated by Erwin Davis in 1889, less than two years after the Wolfe bequest.103 Davis donated Edouard Manet’s Boy with a Sword and Young Lady in 1866, and

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Figure 6.6  Henry Lerolle, The Organ Rehearsal, 1885, oil on canvas, 93 1/4 × 142 3/4 in. (236.9 × 362.6 cm), Gift of George I. Seney, 1887, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org.

Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc, also considered Impressionist in the 1880s. In the early 1890s, Avery suggested to Cesnola how to spend the Wolfe Fund monies. For potential purchases, Avery proposed making a list of artists not represented in the Wolfe collection. Jean-François Millet topped his list, but even with the funds he thought Millet’s paintings might be too expensive.104 And although he also wished to see American artists represented, Avery did not believe the Wolfe Fund should be used to purchase American paintings since her collection featured contemporary European artists.105 Avery wisely avoided any excessive expenditures from the museum’s small acquisition budget. Although retired from art dealing by this point, Avery would still have been aware of market trends, especially highly publicized sales, as he kept sales notices, catalogs, and newspaper reports. The Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly acquired Jean-François Millet’s Angelus (Figure  5.4) through other means. The painting sold for a record-breaking $110,000 from the Secrétan sale in Paris in 1889. James F. Sutton, proprietor of the leading auction firm, the American Art Association, bid against dealer Roland Knoedler, the Corcoran Art Gallery in Washington, DC, and Antonin Proust, Edouard Manet’s supporter, who represented the French government.

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Proust was to purchase it on behalf of a number of dealers to obtain the work for the Louvre. The two American parties bid the painting up, but Proust purchased the work; however, he needed funds from the French government, which they did not give. Only then did Sutton acquire the work, which he promptly displayed in his New York gallery with much drama. According to Laura Meixner, nineteenth-century critics viewed the purchase “as a symbol of the combined superiority of American wealth, artistic connoisseurship, political tolerance, and moral rectitude.”106 Alfred Trumble, editor of the Collector journal, published a fifty-seven-page pamphlet describing and explaining the picture’s cultural significance for visitors.107 It offered a silent sermon to viewers. Men bowed and removed their hats as if in church, and according to a New York Times reviewer, “the religious poetry of the work invades one’s mind.”108 A small private group attempted to purchase the Angelus for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1890 but failed. Then it sold to Alfred Chaucard, a French collector who later gave it to the Louvre.109 This loss, this “symbol of the combined superiority of American wealth, artistic connoisseurship, political tolerance, and moral rectitude,” hurt deeply. The most expensive and symbolic French painting, Millet’s Angelus, unfortunately returned to France despite Herculean efforts to acquire it for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.110 Although Millet’s painting failed to enter the museum, the William Henry Vanderbilt collection, which included Millet’s Sower (Figure  4.7) and Knitting Lesson, hung as a short-term loan at the Metropolitan Museum.111 Of 211 works listed in his 1886 catalog, 101 oil paintings and twenty-nine watercolors and drawings hung at the museum.112 Avery had urged Vanderbilt’s son, George W. Vanderbilt, to lend the collection, undoubtedly hoping the loan would become a gift. He complied, and the pictures hung in the museum from 1902, just two years prior to Avery’s death, until early 1920. Known as the William H. Vanderbilt Collection of Modern Pictures, the collection hung adjacent to its aesthetic and educational cousin, the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Gallery.113 Pictures included Gérôme’s Louis XIV and the Grand Condé and Sword Dance (Figure 4.21), Detaille’s Arrest of the Ambulance Corps (Figure 4.14), de Neuville’s Le Bourget (Figure 4.15), Meissonier’s Information (Figure 2.2), Couture’s Realist and Volunteers of the French Revolution, 1789, Bouguereau’s Going to the Bath (Figure  5.2), Vibert’s Committee on Moral Books, Merle’s Maternal Love, and Cabanel’s Pia de Tolomei (Figure 4.11). In addition were Barbizon works, Corot’s Road near Paris and Rousseau’s Gorge d’Apremont. Vanderbilt’s collection also included works by early nineteenth-century masters, J. M. W. Turner’s Fountain

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of Indolence, and Delacroix’s Muley-Abd-Err-Rahmann, Sultan of Morocco, with His Officers and Guard of Honor, March, 1832. Avery had finally succeeded in securing the Vanderbilt collection as a loan for the museum.114 The collection remained on view well beyond Avery’s death. However, several decades later, the museum returned the Vanderbilt collection to the family, who then dispersed it at auction.115 Avery also lived to witness Collis Potter Huntington’s 1900 bequest, but died before the pictures actually entered the museum’s collection. Huntington had supported the museum since 1877 with annual membership fees of $1,000 as well as additional sporadic donations.116 He died in 1900, but left the collection to his wife, Arabella D. Huntington, and to his son, Archer Milton Huntington. After their deaths, the pictures were to transfer to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.117 After Arabella Huntington died in 1924, Archer inherited them, but he terminated his life interest in 1925 and transferred the pictures to the museum. Unfortunately, Collis Huntington’s pre-1900 contemporary European art collection, which Avery helped assemble, had largely fallen out of favor by then.118 The Huntingtons retained their academic paintings yet later ventured into the Old Master market. Pictures included Alphonse de Neuville’s The DispatchBearer, Merle’s Ferdinand and Miranda (Figure  4.13), Jules Breton’s Weeders, Vibert’s The Missionary’s Adventures (Figure  3.4), and Jean-Jacques Henner’s Fabiola (Figure  4.17). The latter two were formerly in the Mary Jane Morgan collection. Huntington’s collection also encompassed American and Old Master paintings. His American paintings included Eastman Johnson’s The New Bonnet and Seymour Joseph Guy’s Crossing Sweeper. In addition, he started collecting Old Master paintings at low prices as that trend began gaining momentum. He donated Johannes Vermeer’s seventeenth-century painting, Woman with a Lute, which he acquired for $400. Collis and Arabella Huntington had also purchased several eighteenth-century English paintings: Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Lady Smith (Charlotte Delaval) and Her Children (George Henry, Louisa, and Charlotte), and Sir Thomas Lawrence’s Calmady Children.119 The Huntington collection encompassed the changing trends. Dealer Joseph Duveen had become a leading advisor.

Conclusion Wolfe’s bequest along with subsequent donations by Hilton, Schaus, Seney, and Davis formed the basis of the Contemporary European Paintings Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As a result, the museum became the

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major institution the founders had hoped it would be.120 It increased the country’s “mental wealth” and offered art as an “efficient educator.”121 The new contemporary European art collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, effused one critic, now became “one of the most important collections of modern pictures,” not just in New York, but “anywhere.”122 With these donations and other contemporaneous gifts, according to another reviewer, “New-York will now have an art collection of which it may justly be proud, and which is worthy of this great city.”123 Andrew Carnegie praised the Metropolitan Museum of Art as “an excellent beginning [. . .] for the proper use of surplus wealth.”124 That surplus wealth both founded and filled the museum. Collectors (except Belmont) and dealers were involved with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in some capacity as trustees, fundraisers, subscribers, and members and helped validate their own art collections. All but Davis worked with the same art dealers. The collectors’ and dealers’ desire to collect contemporary European art created a blue-chip market in New York. Once the prices peaked, they seeded the museum’s collection with these artistic trophies. The high prices validated the moral and cultural value of the pictures. Securing the most important paintings of the day also meant that a museum would have the best teaching tools. With the pictures then anchoring the European painting collection, contemporary art had been institutionalized, validated, and, most significantly, became available for public education. Museum display not only conferred status on the works, but, along with libraries, served as a crucial center of education. Figure painting by artists such as Cabanel and Bastien-Lepage, along with landscapes by the Barbizon artists, provided the amateur art lover with “a liberal education,” according to one critic writing in 1892.125 Museums transmitted knowledge, taste, and refinement from the expert to the learner. Its orderly, symmetrical displays offered artistic lessons to visitors.126 However, as witnessed by the eavesdropper, if he or she can be believed, not all visitors readily understood the paintings. Educational literature such as catalogs and art history books began to appear in the United States as discussed in the previous chapter. However, with contemporary European art, and especially French art established in the museum, new collecting trends were developing. The World’s Columbian Exposition, the topic of the next chapter, marked a turning point and heralded the waning of the Gilded Age picture rush.

­7

Conclusion: The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 The Parisian art of the moment is represented, but it is represented in company with previous fashions, which are no longer fashionable, and which make an impression of obsolescence that suggests many reflections upon the mutability of taste.1 —New York Times, 1893

By the time the World’s Columbian Exposition took place, nearly three decades had passed since the influential Paris Universal Exposition of 1867. After the Paris exposition, many American collectors virtually abandoned their American pictures in favor of French and other European academic painting. Academic art filled private collections, became educational and marketing tools, and became institutionalized in New York. Once canonized by their display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in printed media and art history surveys, the artworks began to fall out of favor as new collecting trends arose.2 Nowhere was this more evident than at the fine arts exhibit at the World’s Columbian Exposition. This display irrevocably influenced the art world in the United States. It signaled the waning of the Gilded Age picture rush. Academic art no longer appeared modern. Held in Chicago from May 1 through October 31 in 1893, this was the first major international exposition hosted in the United States since the Centennial Exhibition in 1876.3 By 1893, the country’s needs had changed, and a new generation of cultural arbiters wielded their influence. In short, there was a changing of the guard as the younger generation of artists, collectors, and dealers replaced the older generation. The largest fair in the United States to date, the World’s Columbian Exposition attracted over 20 million visitors, about twice that of the 1867 Paris Exposition. Chicago had recently surpassed Philadelphia as the second largest city in the United States and built a “White City” to dazzle visitors despite

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an economic depression. Lit by electricity, the fair celebrated technology, education, consumerism, and entertainment. Visitors could ride the 6 mile-perhour “moveable sidewalk.” Along the entertaining Midway Plaisance (note the French word for “pleasure”), they could ride the Ferris Wheel, created to rival the Eiffel Tower from the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition. Visitors watched a popular dancer later known as “Little Egypt” in the Street in Cairo exhibit, one of the various ethnological villages in the Midway Plaisance representing different stages of civilization (by European standards). She was the living embodiment of Gérôme’s Almeh.4 In the manufacturing exhibitions, which attempted to redefine US culture and progress, one could examine all manner of products. Some of them are still with us, including Quaker Oats, Juicy Fruit gum, Shredded Wheat, Aunt Jemima (now Pearl Milling Company) pancake mix, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, hamburgers, and soda. Yet despite the rapid improvements in American technology, there was still a sense of cultural inferiority that this fair’s fine arts attempted to overcome. Thus, the Art Palace served as a key signpost of US culture and civilization and a strong contrast to the presumably less advanced foreign villages along the Midway Plaisance. Who would organize the US Department of Fine Arts for the 1893 exhibition? Samuel P. Avery, then seventy-one years old, as well as William Walters’ son, Henry, sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and Luigi Palma di Cesnola, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, were among the candidates considered for the position.5 Instead, forty-two-year-old Halsey Cooley Ives was selected. Ives taught art at Washington University and had been serving as the first director of the Saint Louis Art Museum (then called City Art Museum of St. Louis) since 1881. Ives in turn chose thirty-eight-year-old Charles Kurtz, who edited the National Academy of Design’s “National Academy Notes” (1881–1889), the American Art Union Magazine (1884), and New York Daily Star (1889) to be Assistant Chief for the Department of Fine Arts. Kurtz had previously directed the Art Department for the Southern Exposition (Louisville, Kentucky), from 1883 to 1886. He organized the American fine arts section and consulted with numerous artists, collectors, and dealers, including Avery. Ives also assigned forty-threeyear-old Sara Tyson Hallowell to organize the US loan exhibition, identified in the official catalog as “Foreign Masterpieces Owned in the United States,” an assembly of 122 paintings and four sculptures owned by American collectors. Well-connected in the art world, Hallowell had directed art exhibitions in the 1880s at the Chicago Inter-State Industrial Expositions.6

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The American fine arts section exhibited 2,863 works and the French fine arts section exhibited 1,198. Unlike the hierarchical award system in the Paris expositions, the awards at the World’s Columbian initially offered only a bronze medal accompanied by a diploma, and just one juror judged an entire category. Widely considered unfair, participants refused to take part in this “competition.” The French withdrew entirely from competition and thus received no awards. Of the Americans, 198 artists refused to participate, yet the jury forced awards on sixteen of them.7 Ultimately, a compromise led to a change in the one-juror system, although the single bronze medal as the award remained in place. One judge nominated an artist but then needed to be seconded by another judge and then win majority approval from the entire Executive Committee on Awards. The artist, rather than a specific work, received the award. However, awards were not handed out until three years after the fair’s end.8 Aside from this debacle, the exhibitions generated thoughtful comparisons between American and French art. The three different displays, the French fine arts section, the US loan exhibition, and the American fine arts section served as contrasts to one another.9 Some artists, such as Gérôme and Meissonier, were represented by works in both the French section and in the loan exhibition. Despite his continued popularity with American collectors, Bouguereau’s paintings were in the French art section only. Their works, however, were no longer representative of current trends. The inclusion of well-known sentimental Salon works, particularly in the US loan collection, afforded ready comparisons with current styles. Hallowell also included Impressionist art in the loan collection. The comparison made academic art and its traditional, laborious, highly finished style and anecdotal subject matter that Americans had so appreciated appear outdated. Two major factors indicated the decline: a lively interest aroused by the French Impressionist artists, particularly Claude Monet, then fifty-three years old, and the critical success of American art on display in Chicago. American critics’ reactions toward the three exhibitions revealed changing attitudes toward French and American art. These critics began to view American art as a serious rival to French art (a view not shared by the French). Works by the academic artists had been prominent since the 1867 Universal Exposition, but by 1893, Cabanel, Meissonier, de Neuville, Frère, Merle, Toulmouche, and others had died. Barbizon artists Daubigny, Diaz de la Peña, Jules Dupré, and Millet were also dead. Bouguereau and Gérôme were sexagenarians though still actively working. Cabanel, who was not represented at the World’s Columbian Exposition, was mentioned only in passing by John C. Van Dyke, who reviewed the fine arts at the

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fair. He considered Cabanel’s paintings as characteristic of traditional academic art stretching back to Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.10 Van Dyke served as librarian at Rutgers College and continued this role after his 1889 appointment as professor of the history of art. The interest in French Impressionist art in the United States had been growing since the mid-1880s. In 1885, Samuel P. Avery favored curating an Impressionist art exhibition (including Mary Cassatt’s work) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art but felt that the public would not yet understand it.11 Instead, the first significant show of Impressionist pictures took place at the American Art Association in New York in 1886, shortly before the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe bequest to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.12 Favorable reception of this Impressionist show led to another the following year. New York art galleries, Boussod, Valadon & Co. (formerly Goupil’s), and Durand-Ruel hosted Impressionist exhibitions. American collectors and commentators thus responded to shifts in public interest, still attempting to educate the public in the process. Clara Stranahan included a section on Impressionist painting in her 1888 book written for students, A History of French Painting. Influential critic Theodore Child positively assessed the French Impressionist artists. He urged viewers to be open-minded about this new style of art and astutely added that art initially considered reactionary eventually becomes conventional.13 Child was referring to the controversy Impressionist painting had sparked in France twelve years earlier. In the United States, Impressionism was a new style that American critics and commentators interpreted for its new audience. Child attempted to teach his readers a lesson about art and changing tastes. He identified the characteristics of the Impressionist painter as “spontaneity, absolute originality, and marked personality.”14 Child considered Degas to be the greatest of this group of artists and especially admired his paintings of ballet dancers. A few American collectors had ventured into collecting Impressionist art after the 1886 exhibition in New York. In 1888, Albert Spencer sold his collection of Barbizon and academic art, including Gérôme’s The Snake Charmer. He began buying Impressionist art in the mid-1880s as did Mary Cassatt’s brother, Alexander Cassatt. Mary Cassatt, age forty-eight at the time of the exposition, actively promoted Impressionist paintings in her social circle and acted as an agent.15 Both collectors lent Monet’s paintings from their own collections to the US loan collection.16

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­Faded Glory: Salon Art at the French Fine Arts Section French art at the World’s Columbian Exposition was displayed in two adjacent sections: the French fine arts section and the US loan collection (see map— Figure  7.1). This large exhibition of broad-ranging artistic styles in one place allowed critics to assess the state of the fine arts in general. Regular and frequent reviews of the fair’s fine arts exhibition appeared in the major art journals and newspapers of the times. Although pleased with the presence of modern French art in the loan collection, American critics felt that the older French academic pictures in the French fine arts exhibit represented a “vanishing school.”17 They felt that the French fine arts section represented art of the past rather than current trends. Because of this perceived incompleteness, they felt the French made a poor showing. One critic commented that the United States’ private galleries contained the “best paintings of the modern French school,” but the French academic artists such as Gérôme, Lefebvre, Bouguereau, and Cabanel were becoming “oldfashioned.”18 The older artists’ works were already on view at the Metropolitan

Figure 7.1  Ground plan with notations by author, Palace of the Fine Arts, World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893. Source: Moses P. (Purnell) Handy, World’s Columbian Exposition Chicago. Revised Catalogue, Department of Fine Arts: With Index of Exhibitors, Official ed. (Chicago: W.B. Conkey Co., 1893), 6.

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Museum of Art. Inevitably, the “modern” French school, increasingly defined by younger artists, changed the artistic landscape. But the French display excluded works by major living artists such as Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Jean-Charles Cazin, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, and Dagnan-Bouveret, who represented various newer styles.19 A New York Times reviewer noted that although some current art was represented, it was “in company with previous fashions, which are no longer fashionable,” meaning French academic art.20 John C. Van Dyke, among other critics, echoed this sentiment and showed a marked inclination toward Impressionism. He wrote about nature as well as about art. His love of nature and fascination with Impressionism guided his preference for landscape painting and informed his negative reaction to the French fine arts section at the fair. The selection of French art, according to Van Dyke, then thirty-seven years old, showed “the capricious, or mannered, efforts of her studios instead of the heart of her people.”21 The “mannered” style referred to academic art and the “heart” of French art in this case referred to the art of the younger artists and the Impressionists. Van Dyke felt that the French painting section only reflected the past and found a legacy of “academic emptiness” stemming from David and Ingres to Cabanel. However, of these three artists, only Ingres was represented in the French section.22 Van Dyke asserted derogatorily that everyone was already familiar with “the inanities of the Bouguereaus, the sterility of the Gérômes . . . [and] the littleness of the Meissoniers.”23 An unnamed reporter more diplomatically stated that the work of Gérôme and of Meissonier represented their well-known and long-appreciated scientific exactitude of technique but lacked feeling.24 This interpretation was the opposite of the sentimental, moral, and educational value this art represented in the 1870s and 1880s. American critic and painter William Coffin, who reviewed the French fine arts at length for the Nation, offered some suggestions for the old-fashioned appearance of the French exhibit. To him it seemed as if “Old Salon men” had assembled the collection.25 By 1890, there was no longer an official Paris Salon.26 The “Old Salon” referred to the conservative Salon of the Société des artistes français, led by Bouguereau. They held exhibitions similar to the traditional Paris Salon. The Société nationale des beaux-arts, led briefly by Meissonier until his death in 1891, hosted a more progressive Salon. Puvis de Chavannes, whose work pleased both conservative and avant-garde artists, succeeded him.27 Coffin’s comment was accurate as most of the men serving as jurors

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belonged to the conservative group. In 1893, Gérôme served as president of the French admissions jury for paintings and drawings for the World’s Columbian Exposition. Bonnat and Puvis de Chavannes, who was represented only in the loan collection, were vice presidents. Bouguereau was among the members of the jury that also included two of Cabanel’s most prominent former students, Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant and Henri Gervex. Other members included Vibert, Lefebvre, Harpignies, and J.-P. Laurens. Roger Ballu, editor of the prominent French journal, L’Art, served as Art Commissioner for the French fine arts section. He had replaced Art Commissioner Antonin Proust, Édouard Manet’s friend, after Proust stepped down from his position prematurely due to his connection to a scandal. Had Proust carried through as commissioner, the selection probably would have leaned toward Impressionism. Coffin blamed this late change of guard for the sense of incompleteness and focus on academic art in the French section.28 American critics were disappointed with the selection of works in the French fine arts section. In a lengthy assessment of French displays at the fair, a reviewer for the New York Times echoed Coffin’s sentiment. The writer attributed the general disappointment in the French fine art display to its air of obsolescence.29 Although no names were specified, the writer implied that the same old academic artists made the exhibition seem outmoded. Reviewers did not denigrate French academic art; they simply found it outdated. At least one reviewer considered Gérôme, then sixty-nine years old, contemporary, but most thought the sixty-seven-year-old Bouguereau old-fashioned.30 One critic flatly stated that Bouguereau’s “scepter has departed.”31 Bouguereau’s paintings of shepherdesses and children populated American art collections, but he was represented in the French fine arts exhibit at the fair instead by two religious paintings, The Holy Women at the Sepulchre and Our Lady of the Angels, and one allegorical nude, The Wasp’s Nest. Holy Women at the Sepulchre received appreciative, if lukewarm, commentary from the Art Amateur.32 Echoing the sentiments of French critic René Ménard, other American reviewers found Bouguereau’s smooth, familiar style well suited to Biblical subjects.33 Biblical subjects, though, remained relatively unpopular. Aside from these few reviews of his works, Bouguereau’s entries attracted little notice. The Wasp’s Nest was ignored. Similarly, reviewers ignored Gérôme’s only painting, Oedipus, in the French exhibit, and Meissonier’s several sculptures inspired little comment.34

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“Special Glory”: French Impressionism in Foreign Masterpieces Owned in the United States In contrast to the disappointing display in the French section, the broad variety of French art in the small US loan collection, “Foreign Masterpieces Owned in the United States,” received widespread attention. The title emphasized private collections. Over 120 pictures, nearly all French, comprised the loan collection. As the Assistant Chief of the Department of Fine Arts, Sarah Tyson Hallowell selected and secured the loans from American collectors across the United States. She actively promoted modern French art in Chicago and acted as advisor to the city’s most prominent collectors, Bertha and Potter Palmer, who had begun collecting Impressionist paintings.35 Potter Palmer served on the exposition’s Board of Directors’ Fine Arts Committee. Hallowell devoted three-quarters of the exhibition to French art because of its prominence in American collections. The three rooms where these pictures hung bridged the French and American fine art exhibits (see Figure 7.1).36 With her selections for the US loan collection, Hallowell redressed the perceived imbalance of the French fine arts section.37 The selection consisted of a broad cross section of French art styles, mainly from the second half of the nineteenth century. Hallowell balanced traditional and modern in the exhibition. The selection included two paintings by Meissonier, and two paintings and a sculpture by Gérôme, as well as Barbizon painters, but also Naturalists and Impressionists. Although she requested four paintings from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bonheur’s Horse Fair (Figure 3.1), Meissonier’s 1807, Friedland (Figure 3.6), Manet’s Boy with a Sword, and Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc, she was refused.38 However, her choices reveal her attempts to balance well-known artists (Bonheur, Meissonier) and more progressive ones (Manet, Bastien-Lepage) who painted in different styles. Manet’s and Bastien-Lepage’s paintings were both then considered Impressionist. She did secure other important works by Puvis de Chavannes, Vibert, Cazin, Monet, Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Luc-Olivier Merson, Degas, and Dagnan-Bouveret whose works were absent from the French section. The presence of their paintings strengthened the US loan collection.39 The variety and quality of the French paintings in the loan collection led the Critic’s reporter, Lucy Monroe, to remark that it was the display’s “special glory.”40 Although critics remarked on Gérôme’s and Meissonier’s work in the loan collection, most instead focused on Puvis de Chavannes’s decorative art and

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on the portraits by Léon Bonnat, by Carolus-Duran, and by Cabanel’s former students, Théobald Chartran and Henri Gervex.41 The realism and brilliant color of the French portrait painters struck critics.42 Puvis de Chavannes, creator of the “finest decorative work of our time,” received the commission to adorn the main staircase of the Boston Public Library with several paintings shortly after the fair’s closing.43 Other younger artists who attracted notice were Cazin, and the Naturalist painters Bastien-Lepage, Cabanel’s student, and DagnanBouveret, Gérôme’s student. Cazin’s widely admired landscapes, according to the Art Amateur, bridged the gap between Barbizon and Impressionist landscape paintings.44 Paintings by Bastien-Lepage also appeared to descend from the adored Barbizon painters.45 Dagnan-Bouveret’s peasant pictures charmed critics.46 French Impressionist work, already established in France, finally gained attention in the United States. Manet and Degas, both considered Impressionist artists, garnered much notice. Reviewers acknowledged Manet, although deceased, as the leader of French Impressionism.47 Had Manet lived, he would have been sixty-one at the time of the fair. Painted three decades before the 1893 Exposition, Manet’s Dead Toreador attracted critical attention.48 Lucy Monroe commented that the Dead Toreador was “superbly handled with admirable simplicity and directness” and summed up the general admiration for the picture.49 The “artistic realism” of Degas’ ballet dancers from the 1870s, as well as the “fascinating combination of ugliness and beauty” impressed American critics.50 Degas was fifty-nine years old at the time of the fair. In her “Chicago Letter,” Monroe offered glowing praise in her assessments of Monet and the French Impressionist work on display in the loan collection. Of the French Impressionist artists, Monet reigned supreme. Thanks to his work, Monroe proclaimed that Impressionism was the art of the future (in the United States).51 This comment is significant because acclaim for Impressionist art replaced that once reserved for French academic art in American collections. Regarding Monet, critics generally did not focus on specific paintings but instead spoke of his work as a whole or of Monet as the leader of a new school.52 (His painting, Impression, Sunrise, from which the movement is named, was exhibited in Paris in 1874, nearly twenty years prior to the World’s Columbian Exposition.) By way of introduction, Monroe informed readers that Monet’s widespread influence on contemporary artists could not be ignored and that all but the most

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conservative viewer would appreciate the beauty of his paintings.53 For example, she was astounded by the “truth” of the “exquisitely delicate, exquisitely suggestive” pale colors of Pourville in the Morning, Misty Weather (now known as Foggy Morning at Pourville, Figure 7.2).54 “Truth” in this sense differed from the “truth” in sentiment, historical accuracy, and science so prized in academic art. Monet’s “truth” referred to color in nature. Roger Riordan of the Art Amateur summed up the enthusiastic critical comments about Monet’s colorful paintings: Monet was in a class by himself because of his vivid, innovative use of color and his truthful hues, visible only when his pictures were seen from a distance.55 Conceptions of truth changed from scientific observation and photographic realism (realistically portrayed objects and people, past or present) to accuracy of color in nature. In other words, truth changed from narrative to natural phenomena.

Figure 7.2  Claude Monet, Le Matin, temps brumeux, Pourville (Foggy Morning at Pourville), 1882, oil on canvas, 24 × 29 1/8 in. (61 × 74 cm). Birmingham Museum of Art, Museum purchase with funds provided by 1977 and 1980–1983 Museum Dinner and Balls, 1981.40. artsbma.org/collection. Source: commons. wikimedia.org

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Positive attention by persuasive critics such as Theodore Child and by other explanatory articles on Impressionist art paved the way for American readers’ and exhibition visitors’ understanding of Impressionism at the World’s Columbian Exposition.56 Theodore Child did not, however, praise Impressionist art at the expense of academic art. He reiterated his even-handed approach to art by contrasting the art of Bouguereau and Cabanel, who each “created a wholly imaginary objective world” through their realistic style, with Degas and Manet, who sought “to reproduce . . . the subjective appearance of things.”57 Although Child predicted that Bouguereau’s art would rank alongside classical masters in his opinion, it was time for the art world to move on.58 For him, the new heads of modern French art were Puvis de Chavannes, Cazin, Manet, and BastienLepage, although the latter two were deceased.59 The year 1893 was crucial for French Impressionism in the United States, as art historian Frances Weitzenhoffer has shown.60 Concurrent with the Chicago fair, paintings by Monet and other French Impressionist paintings were shown at the Vanderbilt Gallery of the American Fine Arts Society in New York. With these exhibitions and with the overwhelmingly positive critical interest in French Impressionist art in the US loan collection at the World’s Columbian Exposition, French Impressionism gained widespread attention in the United States.61 Teaching the general public how to appreciate work that was already understood abroad helped shape aesthetics in the United States. William Coffin spoke as the only dissenting voice regarding the quality of the loan exhibition. Coffin would contribute chapters on Theodore Rousseau and Dagan-Bouveret for Modern French Masters (1896).62 He acknowledged the widespread attention the loan collection received, but he felt that most of the pictures were not actually masterpieces, as the title of the exhibit advertised, with the exception of Millet’s Peasant Leaning on His Hoe and Manet’s “unique” Dead Toreador.63 Shortly before the close of the fair, Emma Bullet, a reporter for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, emphatically stated in her review title that Monet, a trailblazer, was “Now in Favor in America.”64 The overwhelmingly positive press Monet and Impressionist artists received as a result of the fair affirmed their rising popularity. The next generation of American artists, collectors, and dealers were ready for change. Academic painting was by now well established in the United States through collecting, art survey books, and art museums. Mary Cassatt and dealer Paul Durand-Ruel promoted the French Impressionist artists as Avery and Goupil had for Gérôme and the academics. A writer for the New York Times credited Durand-Ruel with keeping “the extreme open-air impressionists [such

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as Monet, Renoir, and Degas] [. . .] before the American public.”65 Bullet wrote that “Parisian dealers have set about teaching Americans to admire and buy Monet” and that his works garnered high prices, though she did not provide examples.66 Artists and connoisseurs now admired “trailblazers in art,” as opposed to the traditional Paris Salon artists. They affirmed that it was “fashionable to admire and understand Monet.”67 Auction sales in New York began to include Monet’s paintings, indicating that Americans had started buying his paintings. While the World’s Columbian Exposition was still open, a sale of works by M. Knoedler & Co. included some canvases by Monet that sold for about $1,000 each, but these paintings were purchased by Durand-Ruel rather than by prominent private collectors.68 Durand-Ruel probably purchased the paintings to make sure that the pictures appeared desirable, since auction sales results were reported in newspapers and journals. The Collector reported that two pictures by Monet in the George Seney auction sold for $775 and $1,300, on a par with prices garnered for George Inness’ paintings.69 Other dealers also sold Impressionist paintings, and prices began to reflect growing interest. Pictures by Monet and by Renoir were occasionally in the stock books of the Paris gallery, Boussod, Valadon, & Co. (formerly Goupil’s), who still actively sold works by Bouguereau, Gérôme, and Meissonier to Americans. For example, Louisine and Henry O. Havemeyer bought a painting by Monet in 1897 for $4,800 from Boussod’s and a snow scene the following year for just under $2,000.70 Both of these figures were more than double the price of the paintings sold at auction in New York just a few years earlier. Impressionism, however, was not the only style that interested collectors.

American Art Surpasses French Art? Critics established that the French fine arts display appeared outdated and that modern French art exhibited in Foreign Masterpieces Owned in the United States was the art of the future, but how was American art perceived at its own fair? The French influence on American artists who studied in France, bemoaned by some critics, had lessened after the artists returned home.71 As Henry James remarked in the mid-1870s, “It sounds like a paradox, but it is a very simple truth, that when to-day we look for ‘American art’ we find it mainly in Paris. When we find it out of Paris, we at least find a great deal of Paris in it.”72 Theodore Child had

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already praised the American artists at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889, identifying John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, William Turner Dannat, and Edwin Austin Abbey as the best American artists, on par with European artists such as Giovanni Boldini (Italian), Mihaly Munkácsy (Hungarian), and Alfred Stevens (Belgian). At that time, however, he still acknowledged French art as top rank.73 In 1886, Alfred Stevens expressed “faith in the future of art in America,” but his initial reaction to American painting was negative. He had seen only poor reproductions at that point, but seeing the original paintings by Americans who had studied in Europe positively impressed him.74 In 1893, the American fine arts display greatly impressed reviewers, although French art remained the benchmark of comparison.75 Lucy Monroe summed up the general feeling that American art had progressed rapidly over the past few years. She concluded that “careful study of the French and American sections of the exposition art department only serves to confirm the first impression that the latter is the stronger of the two.”76 Only several years prior to the fair, she continued, her assessment would have been unthinkable, but she assured her readers that after viewing the remarkable showing at the exposition, it was true nonetheless.77 Van Dyke felt that the French grip on the art world was fading and that the future of modern art looked toward the United States.78 At least for Van Dyke, William Armstrong’s earlier prediction came true—just as French art emerged victorious from rough beginnings, so did American art.79 Hitchcock too found the American school “fresh.”80 One news headline, “French Art Jealousy,” asserted that the French were actually worried that American art would surpass their country’s art.81 This bold headline and enthusiastic reviews indicated pride in American art; the primacy of French academic art in the United States had ended. Yet American critics and reviewers in 1893 particularly praised the expatriates, Sargent and Whistler, then thirty-seven and fifty-nine, respectively.82 Sargent, who had studied at the École des beaux-arts and under Carolus-Duran in Paris, garnered praise for his technical skill as well as for the grandeur and simplicity he achieved in his portraits, exemplified by Portrait of Mrs. Edward L. Davis and Her Son, Livingston Davis and by his half-length portrait of Louise Pomeroy Inches. Whistler’s portraits also attracted attention. Coffin called Whistler “the cleverest of living painters” and singled out Whistler’s Lady with the Yellow Buskin for its sophisticated, harmonious arrangement of browns, grays, and blacks, with a note of yellow.83 However, Sargent and Whistler, according to some critics, could not truly be claimed as “American,” or any

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nationality because they had spent the larger part of their careers away from the United States.84 By way of contrast, the fifty-two-year-old Thomas Hovenden, who had studied in Paris with Cabanel, exhibited Breaking Home Ties (Figure  7.3). Although not at all a critical success, the sentimental genre painting captured the public’s attention. It was the most popular American picture at the fair.85 It depicted a common theme of this era. In a humble interior, a mother stands to bid farewell to her son, who is off to the city to find work. The family and their dog surround him to say their good-byes. Many families experienced the same situation as loved ones increasingly moved from rural to urban areas in search of employment. This was a period of rapid industrialization and a vanishing agrarian economy. Critics may have wanted change, but much of the public still admired sentimental genre painting. Of the homegrown American artists, most critics instead found the art of Winslow Homer (fifty-seven) and landscape painter George Inness (fifty-eight) strongly and fully American.86 Although Homer had been to France during the

Figure 7.3  Thomas Hovenden, Breaking Home Ties, 1890, oil on canvas, 52 1/8 × 72 1/4 in. (132.4 × 183.5 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA. https://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/47809.html. Source: commons.wikimedia.org.

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1867 Paris Universal Exposition, he did not formally study there. According to Coffin, Homer was “a law unto himself in technical methods and individuality of expression.”87 However, for most critics landscape painting represented the true strength of the American school and came closest to an authentic “American” art.88 According to Coffin, American landscape painting had largely escaped foreign influences, and the subject matter focused on American rather than on French land.89 Critics repeatedly praised Inness, the leading American landscape painter, whom one critic dubbed “the successor of the Barbizon school.”90 The fully American Inness followed in the footsteps of the French Barbizon school. Although Sargent, Whistler, Homer, and Inness shone as leading American painters, reviewers found the work of younger American artists promising and original, in spite of the acknowledged foreign, mainly French, influences.91 Van Dyke summed up the optimism writers felt about American art. He said, as Monroe had, that just a short time before the World’s Columbian Exposition, the United States had had little quality painting of its own, but now: “we have a painting full of much skill, energy, and sentiment, with considerable originality.”92 Van Dyke concluded his enthusiastic assessment of the American fine arts display with his prophecy that “the book of our [American] art has just been opened, and no one knows what bright deeds of beauty may be written upon its pages in the years to come.”93 The fair called attention to American arts’ success, marking a comeback for art produced by American artists.

Conclusion The fine arts exhibitions at the World’s Columbian Exposition marked a turning point in art collecting. American collectors and critics had supported the influx of European art to achieve a strong American art, but once this aim had been achieved, they turned to their own art and to new styles. The Gilded Age picture rush faded as the artists, collectors, and dealers aged or died, and their students or successors began replacing them. In concerted effort, American collectors had bought French and other European academic artworks, but in a matter of a few decades, a generation, such work was passing into irrelevance. The fervor for collecting academic art that snowballed after the 1867 Paris Exposition declined by the 1893 Chicago Exposition. New collecting trends in French Impressionism and Old Master painting had begun slowly during this period but quickened by

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the late 1890s following the fair. The first wave of the Gilded Age picture rush was coming to a close. “Foreign Masterpieces Owned in the United States” served as both a beginning and an end. It marked the beginning of a proud assertion that Americans did indeed own masterpieces of foreign artworks that rivaled European collections of nineteenth-century art. It also marked a critical beginning for French Impressionism in the United States. However, it signaled an end, evident in commentators’ remarks, that many of the foreign masterpieces were no longer contemporary. The deaths of Cabanel, Meissonier, de Neuville, Merle, Toulmouche, and other Salon artists, and of the dealers, wealthy collectors, and the critics who had so energetically promoted French art in the United States since the late 1860s coincided with this transition to the primacy of new styles and younger artists. Younger artists had moved on to newer styles. Old and new styles, past and present, hung together, making Impressionism appear fresh. A new generation arose, and tastes began changing. Another collecting cycle had begun, just as collecting European academic art emerged after the 1855 Paris Universal Exposition and accelerated after the 1867 Exposition, leading to the Gilded Age picture rush. The academic artists were not forgotten, but attention in the journals and newspapers gradually lessened. Some critics continued to speak well of the older artists represented in the loan collection, Gérôme in particular, but their comments were nostalgic. For example, of the almost five-hundred works in the French galleries at the World’s Columbian, according to exhibition chronicler William Walton, none of them equaled Gérôme’s “two once very famous” paintings, L’Éminence grise (1873) and The Snake Charmer (c. 1879), in the US loan collection, or paintings by Couture, Ingres, or Meissonier.94 Ripley Hitchcock, a well-known art critic and author of works on American etchings, called Gérôme “the most famous of living French masters since the death of Meissonier,” and commented on his well-known dramatic contrasts in past paintings such as Ave Caesar, morituri te saluant, L’Éminence grise, and Duel after the Masquerade (Figure 2.1).95 In spite of the critical malaise the old French academic artists inspired, there were indications that the public was not yet tired of their work. Hitchcock attested to the artist’s enduring popularity with the public when he reported that Gérôme’s The Snake Charmer, lent by Alfred Corning Clark of New York, was one of the main attractions and most popular works in the loan exhibition.96 Van Dyke remarked with mild irritation that “a popular ballot for the best painters would probably place Gérôme and Meissonier in the front rank and relegate

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Ingres, Millet, and Courbet to obscurity.”97 Remarks such as these gave voice to popular opinion, which still evidently enjoyed the French academic artists’ work. Another critic waxed poetic on Gérôme’s L’Éminence grise and The Snake Charmer; however, L’Éminence grise merited only a short straightforward description.98 Hitchcock also stated that Gérôme’s public paintings in Paris, and his more recent sculptures, one of which, Pygmalion and Galatea (1892), was in the loan collection, altogether “have proved the versatility of his talents.”99 As former student of Léon Bonnat, William Coffin suggested that Pygmalion and Galatea’s placement in the loan collection was “a delicate compliment” to the many American artists who studied with him.100 The story of the sculptor creating an ideal figure that comes to life paralleled Gérôme’s role as a teacher forming his students. Yet critics generally spoke of Gérôme’s well-known works in the past tense, even though he had embarked on a different trajectory by becoming a sculptor. Gérôme and Meissonier were mentioned together in another review of the loan collection, which described them as “realistic” painters who focused on picturesque costumes and archaeological accuracy rather than “passion and motion.”101 This perceived lack of “passion and motion” indicated shifting preferences from historical representations to works that expressed current subject matter. Another critic voiced a similar sentiment about Meissonier’s detailed, accurate work.102 Meissonier’s two paintings, A View near Poissy and A Reconnaissance, received only brief mention as typical of his grand manner on a small scale.103 This relatively quick change in contemporary criticism from praise to outmoded over a span of less than fifteen years reflects a generation gap. The “Old Salon men” were indeed old or dead, as were some of their key collectors: Stewart, Wolfe, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Johnston, and Belmont. Their supporters, Edward Strahan, James Jackson Jarves, and Theodore Child, were all dead by 1893. Clarence Cook was then sixty-five and near the end of his career. During this era a coterie of white, largely male bourgeois dealers, collectors, and critics had high hopes for the cultural future of the United States. The collectors helped establish the foundation for US culture during the Gilded Age picture rush. Through their efforts, the United States truly became an educational storehouse of art treasures. Begun on the East Coast, the Gilded Age picture rush spread swiftly across the country. Without this early rush for European academic and Barbizon art, Impressionist, Old Master, and avantgarde collecting could not have taken place. Pictures from each collecting

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The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age

phase now fill art museums in the United States. The legacy of the Gilded Age picture rush can be seen by every visitor to the nineteenth-century rooms in art museums across the United States. As Eugene Benson stated: “An adequate account of pictures in modern galleries would be a comment on the ideas, the tastes, the sentiments, the manners and customs, of the men and women of our epoch.” This era of collecting, largely spearheaded by European and American men and by several women collectors and writers, gives us insight into white bourgeois values of morality, which was at the forefront. The wealthiest minority’s notion of civilization and an assumed unified culture is evident in the Gilded Age picture rush collections, texts, and museums. Moralizing tales, bourgeois leisure, picturesque peasants, dignified military men, sentimental historical characters, Orientalist stereotypes, pasturing cows, agrarian scenes, all give later generations a glimpse into the ideologies of the past. This era of collecting exposes the aspirations as well as the stereotypes and prejudices of an age, some of them unfortunately still in force. Omitted from the pictures in the collections and marginalized in US society were African Americans, the formerly enslaved, Chinese immigrants, and the indigenous people of the United States, whom the nation was still fighting and placing on reservations. Yvon’s painting (Figure 4.1) was the only one which included people of color, but as lesser peoples in need of guidance and civilizing influences from Euro-Americans. The worthy poor were picturesque, contented subjects seen from a safe, painted distance. Modern art history—art history in general—aims for clear, chronological narratives, but art history is far more complex. The real value of exploring this complexity is to add to our understanding of how the United States’ cultural institutions and identity formed. Without an equally large body of late nineteenth-century pictures and texts by indigenous people, African Americans, women, the poor, immigrants, or other disenfranchised groups, the United States is left with an epoch defined by a very small white minority. These affluent collectors felt morally and intellectually superior to the lower classes, people of color, and foreigners. How much of the Gilded Age picture rush ideologies are still present in US society today? What will “[a]n adequate account of pictures in modern galleries” reveal about our own era, the early twenty-first century?

Notes Chapter 1 1

2

3 4

5

6

7

See Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); John Ott, “The Manufactured Patron: Staging Bourgeois Identity through Art Consumption in Postbellum America,” in The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Sven Beckert and Julia Rosenbaum (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Gary Gerstle and Steve Fraser, eds., Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Margaret R. Laster and Chelsea Bruner, eds., New York: Art and Cultural Capital of the Gilded Age (New York and London: Routledge, 2019). Linda Dowling, Charles Eliot Norton: The Art of Reform in Nineteenth-Century America, Becoming Modern: New Nineteenth-Century Studies (Dartmouth: University of New Hampshire Press, 2007), 85; Ryan T. A. Swihart, “An Ornament and a Promise: Discourses on Culture in Nineteenth-Century America” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2008), 146–50. Henry James, The Letters of Henry James, 2 vols., vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1920), 22. Letter from Collis P. Huntington to R. M. McLane, Paris, September 15, 1885, p. 88. Henry Edwards Huntington Papers, Box 30/17, Folder 1, Ledger-Letter Book, 1885, May–1887, January, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. Maureen E. Montgomery, “‘Natural Distinction’: The American Bourgeois Search for Distinctive Signs in Europe,” in The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Sven Beckert and Julia B. Rosenbaum (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 27–44. See also Swihart; Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 53–5. David Nasaw, “Gilded Age Gospels,” in Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy, ed. Gary Gerstle and Steve Fraser (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 128. There is much literature on the Barbizon School. See for example, Steven Adams, The Barbizon School & the Origins of Impressionism (London: Phaidon, 1997); John Sillevis and Hans Kraan, eds., The Barbizon School (Hague, Netherlands: Haags Gemeentemuseum, 1986); Véronique Chagnon-Burke, The Politicization of Nature: The Critical Reception of Barbizon Painting during the July Monarchy

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(Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2009); Amy Kurlander and Simon Kelly, The Untamed Landscape: Théodore Rousseau and the Path to Barbizon (New York: The Morgan Library & Museum, 2014); Simon Kelly, Théodore Rousseau and The Rise of the Modern Art Market: An Avant-garde Landscape Painter in NineteenthCentury France (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2021); Domenico Montalto; Luigi Tavola, Corot e Daubigny: due rami ritrovati: con alcune riflessioni sulla stampa d’arte (Milano, Italy: Silvia Editrice srl, 2013); Margret Stuffmann, Camille Corot: Natur und Traum (Karlsruhe: Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe; Heidelberg: Kehrer, 2012); Alexandra R. Murphy, Jean-François Millet: Drawn into the Light (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Return to Nature: J.F. Millet, the Barbizon Artists, and the Renewal of the Rural Tradition (Kōfu, Japan: Yamanashiken, 1998); Alexandra R. Murphy, Susan Fleming, and Chantal Mahy-Park, Jean-François Millet (Boston Little, Brown: Distributed by New York Graphic Society Books, 1984); Pierre Miquel and Rolande Miquel, Narcisse Diaz de La Peña (1807–1876), 2 vols. (Courbevoie (Paris): ACR Édition, 2006); L’école de Barbizon: peindre en plein air avant l’impressionnisme (Lyon: Musée des BeauxArts de Lyon, 2002); Pierre-Olivier Fanica, Charles Jacque, 1813–1894: Graveur original et peintre animalier (Montigny-sur-Loing: Art Bizon, 1995); Annette Bourrut Lacouture, Jules Breton, Painter of Peasant Life (New Haven and London: Yale University Press; Dublin: The National Gallery, 2002); Michael Hollowell Duffy, The Influence of Charles-Francois Daubigny (1817–1878) on French Plein Air Landscape Painting: Rustic Portrayals of Everyday Life in the Work of a Forerunner to Impressionism (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 2010); Gary Tinterow, Vincent Pomarède, and Michael Pantazz, Corot (Paris: RMN; Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada; New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996). 8 Lillian B. Miller, Patrons and Patriotism: The Encouragement of the Fine Arts in the United States 1790–1860 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982). 9 John Peter Simoni, “Art Critics and Criticism in Nineteenth-Century America”; (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1952), 9. For histories see W. G. Constable, Art Collecting in the United States of America: An Outline of a History (New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd., 1964). René Brimo, The Evolution of Taste in American Collecting, trans. Kenneth Haltman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016). See also David B. Dearinger, “An Introduction to the History of American Art Criticism to 1925,” in Rave Reviews: American Art and Its Critics, 1826–1925, ed. David B. Dearinger (New York: National Academy of Design, 2000), 17–29. 10 John Ott, Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 4. 11 See the following on markets in England, France, and the United States: Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, eds., The Rise of the Modern Art Market

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in London: 1850–1939 (Manchester, UK; New York: Manchester University Press, 2011); Albert Boime, “America’s Purchasing Power and the Evolution of European Art in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Saloni, gallerie, musei e loro influenza sullo sviluppo dell’arte dei secoli XIX e XX, ed. Francis Haskell (Bologna: CLUEB, 1979); Boime, “Entrepreneurial Patronage in Nineteenth-Century France,” in Enterprise and Entrepreneurs in 19th and 20th Century France, ed. Edward C. Carter, Robert Forster, and Joseph N. Moody (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1976); Malcolm Goldstein, Landscape with Figures: A History of Art Dealing in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Nicholas Green, “Circuits of Production, Circuits of Consumption: The Case of Mid-Nineteenth-Century French Art Dealing,” Art Journal 48, no. 1 (Spring 1989); Madeleine Fidell-Beaufort, “The American Art Trade and French Painting at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” Van Gogh Museum Journal (2000); Marc Spencer Smith, “Genèse d’un marché d’art: Etats-Unis, 1800–1930” (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2016); Agnès Penot, La Maison Goupil, Galerie d’art internationale au XIXème siècle (Paris: Mare & Martin, 2016); Dianne Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Macleod, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800–1940 (Macleod: Berkeley, University of California Press, 2008); Inge Jackson Reist and Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, eds., Power Underestimated: American Women Art Collectors (Venice: Marsilio, 2011). For a later time frame and smaller art center, see Gabriel P. Weisberg, DeCourcy E. McIntosh, and Alison McQueen, Collecting in the Gilded Age: Art Patronage in Pittsburgh, 1890–1910 (Pittsburgh: Frick Art & Historical Center, 1997). 12 John Ott, “How New York Stole the Art Market: Blockbuster Auctions and Bourgeois Identity in Gilded Age America,” Winterthur Portfolio 42, no. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn 2008): 133–58; Sven Beckert, “Institution-Building and Class Formation: How the Nineteenth-Century Bourgeoisie Organized,” in The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Sven Beckert and Julia Rosenbaum (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Lois Marie Fink, “French Art in the United States, 1850–1870: Three Dealers and Collectors,” Gazette des beaux-arts 92 (September 1978): 87–100; Carol Troyen, “Innocents Abroad: American Painters at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, Paris,” American Art Journal 16, no. 4 (Autumn 1984): 2–29; Boime, “America’s Purchasing Power,” 123–39; Linda Henefield Skalet, “The Market for American Painting in New York: 1870–1915” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1980); FidellBeaufort, 101–7; Goldstein; Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896; Ott, Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California; William S. Ayres, “The Domestic Museum

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in Manhattan: Major Private Art Installations in New York City, 1870–1920” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 1993), 9. 13 Boime, “America’s Purchasing Power,” 124. 14 Anne McNair Bolin, “Art and Domestic Culture: The Residential Art Gallery in New York City, 1850–1870” (PhD diss., Emory University, 2000), 7–25. Henry J. Duffy, “New York City Collections 1865–1895” (PhD diss., Rutgers, 2001). 15 Montgomery, “Natural Distinction,” 30–1. 16 Stephen Greenblatt, ed. Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 17 Brimo, The Evolution of Taste, 167. The original text is L’évolution du goût aux Étatsunis d’après l’histoire des collections (Paris: James Fortune, 1938). 18 Ott, Manufacturing the Modern Patron, 8–9. 19 Gabriel P. Weisberg, “From Paris to Pittsburgh: Visual Culture and American Taste, 1880–1910,” in Collecting in the Gilded Age: Art Patronage in Pittsburgh, 1890–1910, ed. DeCourcey E. McIntosh Gabriel Weisberg, and Alison McQueen (Exh. cat. Pittsburgh: Frick Art & Historical Center; Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1997), 179. H. Barbara Weinberg, “Introduction,” in Art Treasures of America, ed. Edward Strahan [Earl Shinn] (Philadelphia: George Barrie, 1879– 1882; reprint, New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1977), 1, 1–2. “Veblenian” refers to the economist who coined the term “conspicuous consumption.” See Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: Macmillan, 1899). Veblen based his study on the non-working wealthy. All of the male collectors in this book earned their money. 20 Lawrence J. Friedman, “Philanthropy in America: Historicism and Its Discontents,” in Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History, ed. Lawrence J. Friedman and Mark D. McGarvie (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 10. 21 For an analysis of the American art market from this period, see Skalet, “The Market for American Painting in New York.” 22 See Susanna Avery-Quash and Barbara Pezzini, eds., Old Masters Worldwide: Markets, Movements and Museums, 1789–1939 (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). 23 Barbara Dayer Gallati, “Taste, Art, and Cultural Power in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Making American Taste: Narrative Art for a New Democracy, ed. Barbara Dayer Gallati (New York: New-York Historical Society; London: in association with D Giles Ltd., 2011), 115. 24 Laura Meixner explores selected works by Jean-François Millet from the perspective of popular presses, and includes works by Corot, but also by Courbet and Impressionist artists whose work was not yet pervasive in collections. H. Wayne Morgan focused on French Impressionism’s influence on American artists. See Laura L. Meixner, French Realist Painting and the Critique of American Society,

Notes

25 26

27

28 29 30

31

32

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1865–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); H. Wayne Morgan, New Muses: Art in American Culture 1865–1920 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978). Edward Strahan [Earl Shinn], Art Treasures of America, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: George Barrie, 1879–82). See also Brimo, The Evolution of Taste, 134–47. See, for example, Laurence Des Cars, Dominique de Font-Relaux, and Edouard Papet, eds., The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) (exh. cat. Paris: Skira, 2010); Michel Hilaire and Sylvain Amic, Alexandre Cabanel, 1823–1889: La tradition du beau (Paris: Somogy Editions d’art; Montpellier: Musée Fabre, 2010); James F. Peck, In the Studios of Paris: William Bouguereau and His American Students (Tulsa, OK: Philbrook Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Scott Allan and Mary Morton, eds., Reconsidering Gérôme (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2010); Constance Cain Hungerford, Ernest Meissonier: Master in His Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); William Bouguereau 1825– 1905 (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1984); Tanya Paul and Stanton Thomas, eds., Bouguereau & America (Milwaukee Art Museum and Memphis Brooks Museum of Art; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019). See François Robichon, Édouard Détaille: Un siècle de gloire militaire (Paris: B. Giovanangeli: Ministère de la défense, 2007); Robichon, Alphonse de Neuville, 1835–1885 (Paris N. Chaudun: Ministère de la défense, Secrétariat général pour l’administration, Direction de la mémoire, du patrimoine et des archives, 2010). Saul E. Zalesch, “Competition and Conflict in the New York Art World, 1874– 1879,” Winterthur Portfolio 29, no. 2/3 (1994): 117. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital (1986),” in Education: Culture, Economy and Society, ed. A. H. Halsey, et al (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 53. Although the gallery’s name changed to Boussod, Valadon & Cie, successeurs de Goupil & Cie in 1884, I refer to them throughout the text as Goupil or Goupil’s. See the chronology in Penot, La Maison Goupil, 17. For the underpinnings of these two expositions, see Patricia Mainardi, Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). None of these collectors created museums comprised of their own collections. Aside from the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, single-collection art museums were not yet part of the country’s mindset. See Alan Wallach, Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 22–37. Chartered in 1870, the same year as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, it did not open until 1874, two years after the latter opened. The Corcoran Gallery of Art closed in 2014. The next generation opened the Frick Collection, Huntington Library & Art Gallery, Morgan

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Notes Library (now Morgan Library & Museum), Walters Art Gallery (now Walters Art Museum), and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. See Anne Higonnet, A Museum of One’s Own: Private Collecting, Public Gift (New York: Prestel, 2009); John C. Eastberg and Eric Vogel, eds., Layton’s Legacy: A Historic American Art Collection, 1888–2013 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 28–84.

Chapter 2 Frank Leslie, Report on the Fine Arts (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1868), 16. 2 Frank Leslie and Frank H. Norton, Frank Leslie’s Historical Register of the United States Centennial Exposition, 1876 (New York: Frank Leslie’s Pub. House, 1877), 1. 3 See Patricia Mainardi, Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). 4 “Our Artists at the Paris Exposition,” New York Tribune, January 23, 1867, 2. 5 “The Paris Universal Exhibition in 1867,” New York Times, December 25, 1866, 4. 6 François Brunet and Jessica Talley, “Exhibiting the West at the Paris Exposition of 1867: Towards a New American Aesthetic Identity?” Transatlantica 2 (2017), https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/11280, accessed July 12, 2019. 7 James Jackson Jarves, Art Thoughts: The Experiences and Observations of an American Amateur in Europe (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1869), 293. 8 Leslie, Report on the Fine Arts, 10. 9 Paul Mantz, “Les beaux-arts à l’exposition universelle,” Gazette des beaux-arts 23 (September 1 1867): 230; Théophile Thoré, Salons de W. Bürger, 1861 à 1868, 2 vols., vol. 2 (Paris: Renouard, 1870), 413. 10 For a list of the selection committee members, lenders, and names of artists and artworks lent to the exposition, see “Our Artists at the Paris Exposition,” 2. A more readable list of the American artists who participated, along with the titles of artworks and names of lenders, can also be found in the appendix of Carol Troyen, “Innocents Abroad: American Painters at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, Paris,” American Art Journal 16, no. 4 (Autumn 1984): 24–7. 11 “Our Artists at the Paris Exposition,” 2. Knoedler was the first art dealer to belong to the Century. For a contemporary history of the club, see A. R. Macdonough, “The Century Club,” Century 41, no. 5 (March 1891): 673–89. Art exhibitions of members’ works were held at the Century. Some of the committee members had also served together in other capacities aside from the National Academy and the Century. Knoedler, Blodgett, Cozzens, Sturges and Roberts had served 1

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together on a committee for an exhibition at the Metropolitan Fair in 1864. Several artists who sent works to the exposition also served on this committee: Eastman Johnson, Emmanuel Leutze, Worthington Whittredge, and Daniel Huntington. John F. Kensett and Mrs. Jonathan Sturges served as chairs. See Catalogue of the Art Exhibition at the Metropolitan Fair in Aid of the U.S. Sanitary Commission (New York: Metropolitan Fair, 1864). John Taylor Johnston may have purchased several works from the sale. His name is penciled in next to entries in a priced catalog at the Thomas J. Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. See Catalogue of Oil Paintings, Water Colors, Drawings, &C. &C. Contributed to the Metropolitan Fair (New York: Metropolitan Fair, 1864), 7; Evdokia SavidouTerrono, “For ‘the Boys in Blue’: The Art Galleries of the Sanitary Fairs” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2002). ­12 “Our Artists at the Paris Exposition,” 2. 13 See Henry T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, 2nd ed. (New York: G. P. Putnam & Son, 1867), 485. 14 Henry T. Tuckerman, Artist-Life, or, Sketches of American Painters (New York and Philadelphia: Appleton, 1847). 15 Tuckerman, Book of the Artists. The first and second editions of Book of the Artists were published the same year as the Universal Exposition of 1867. The first edition was published in two illustrated volumes, and the second edition, condensed to one volume, was not illustrated. 16 The other three were Cyrus Butler, Robert Hoe, a collector and friend of Avery, and James Lenox. Tuckerman also included a handful of collections in Baltimore, Boston, New Haven, Washington DC, and Philadelphia. In his introduction, Tuckerman mentioned Abraham M. Cozzens, Robert M. Olyphant, Roberts, Stuart, Belmont, Aspinwall, Johnston, and Blodgett, among others, as having the most notable collections of American art in New York. See Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, 19; “Our Artists at the Paris Exposition,” 2. 17 Others included Cozzens, Olyphant, and Jonathan Sturges. For a list of the collections, see Book of the Artists, 621–33. According to Tuckerman, Blodgett owned only sixteen pictures, which included Church’s Heart of the Andes. 18 Annette Blaugrund, The Tenth Street Studio Building (Southampton: Parrish Art Museum, 1997), 133. 19 “Our Artists at the Paris Exposition,” 2. 20 George A. Lucas, Diary of George A. Lucas: An American Art Agent in Paris, 1857–1909, ed. Lilian M. C. Randall, 2 vols., vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 26–7; Madeleine Fidell-Beaufort, Herbert L. Kleinfield, and Jeanne K. Welcher, “Introduction,” in The Diaries 1871–1882 of Samuel P. Avery (New York: Arno Press, 1979), xxii–xxiii.

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21 See Troyen, “Innocents Abroad,” 28, n. 6. Six of Hunt’s pictures are listed in the original catalog, Exposition universelle de 1867 à Paris, catalogue général publié par la commission impériale: oeuvres d’art (Paris: E. Dentu, 1867), 202. 22 “Formal Opening of the Exposition,” New York Observer and Chronicle 45, no. 14 (April 4, 1867): 110. 23 Leslie, Report on the Fine Arts, 6–21. 24 Tuckerman, Book of the Artists; and Jarves, Art Thoughts. 25 See, for example, Malakoff, “The Paris Exposition,” New York Times, May 16, 1867, 1; and “Our Artists at the Paris Exposition,” New York Tribune, January 23, 1867, 2; “The Paris Exposition,” New York Times, April 5, 1867, 5. 26 G. A. T., “The Paris Exhibition,” New York Tribune, May 2, 1867, 1, 5; Malakoff, “Foreign Correspondence: Affairs in France,” New York Times, October 10, 1867, 8; O. B. S., “The French Exhibition,” New York Times, July 8, 1867, 2. See also Troyen’s assessment of the reception of American art, Troyen, “Innocents Abroad,” 2–29. 27 Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, 18. Tuckerman echoed Malakoff ’s comment on Church’s originality. See Malakoff, “The Paris Exposition,” 1. 28 Jarves, Art Thoughts, 298. 29 Malakoff, “The Paris Exposition,” 1. 30 O. B. S. “The French Exhibition,” New York Times, July 8, 1867, 2. Niagara was initially exhibited in New York as a one-picture show at the gallery of Williams, Stevens, Williams and Company. The picture was sent on tour in England in 1857 and again in 1858 to acclaim. See Franklin Kelly, “A Passion for Landscape: The Paintings of Frederic Edwin Church,” in Frederic Edwin Church, ed. Franklin Kelly (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1989), 50–2. 31 Leslie, Report on the Fine Arts, 7. 32 Ibid., 9. 33 Ibid., 16. 34 Ibid., 13. Church, Bierstadt, Gifford, and Régis Gignoux (1816–1882) were his exceptions. 35 Jarves, Art Thoughts, 298. 36 Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, 23. 37 Among them were Sanford Gifford, Régis Gignoux, Charles Loring Elliott, Albert Bierstadt, Asher B. Durand, William Trost Richards, John F. Kensett, Eastman Johnson, and George Inness. For a list of American participants, see Troyen, “Innocents Abroad,” 24–7. 38 See reviews of the Universal Exposition in Ernest Chesneau, Les nations rivales dans l’art (Paris: Didier, 1868), 161–2; Paul Mantz, “Les beaux-arts à l’exposition universelle,” 229–30; and Thoré, Salons de W. Bürger, 1861 à 1868, 2: 413. 39 Mantz, “Les beaux-arts à l’exposition universelle,” 229.

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40 Ibid., 230; Chesneau, Les nations rivales, 161; Thoré, Salons de W. Bürger, 2: 413. 41 The largest fine arts sections included the English with 163 works and Bavarians with 211 works. 42 Eugene Rimmel, Recollections of the Paris Exhibition of 1867 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1868), 266. This book was originally published simultaneously in England and in France as Souvenirs de l’exposition universelle, Paris, 1867 (Paris: E. Dentu; London: Chapman & Hall, 1867). 43 Mantz, “Les beaux-arts à l’exposition universelle,” 230; Thoré, Salons de W. Bürger, 2: 413. 44 See also Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, 486. For the original comments on Whistler, see Malakoff, “The Paris Exposition,” 1; Malakoff, “Foreign Correspondence: Affairs in France,” New York Times, October 10, 1867, 8. 45 Chesneau, Les nations rivales, 161–2. 46 Malakoff, “Foreign Correspondence: Affairs in France,” 8. Malakoff stated that he translated Chesneau’s comments “in full” because the foreign art critics ignored American art. However, the Times did not reprint Chesneau’s comment that the landscapes of Church and Bierstadt were bold, but other American landscapes were conventional. See Chesneau, Les nations rivales, 161. 47 Mantz, “Les beaux-arts à l’exposition universelle,” 230. 48 Thoré, Salons de W. Bürger, 2: 314, 413. 49 Troyen, “Innocents Abroad,” 19. French landscapists fared well in 1867: Théodore Rousseau won a Medal of Honor; Jean-François Millet, Jules Breton and Charles Daubigny won first-class medals, and Rosa Bonheur, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Jules Dupré won second-class medals. Thus, Church ranked on par with Bonheur, Corot, and Dupré. 50 Ibid., 19. ­51 G. A. T., “The Paris Exhibition,” New York Tribune, May 2, 1867, 1. 52 Leslie, Report on the Fine Arts, 18. 53 Ibid., 14, 18. 54 G. A. T., “The Paris Exhibition,” New York Tribune, May 2, 1867, 1. 55 Ibid. 56 M. D. Conway, “The Great Show at Paris Again,” Harper’s New Monthly 35, no. 210 (November 1867): 781. Among French artists, Conway disliked Cabanel and Meissonier. 57 Exposition universelle de 1867 à Paris, 202. 58 Ibid., 14. 59 Ibid., 243. 60 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 37.

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61 Philippe Grunchec, Les concours des prix de Rome 1797–1863, 2 vols. (Paris: École des beaux-arts, 1986); Albert Boime, The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth-Century (London: Phaidon, 1971). 62 See Geneviève Lacambre, Le musée du Luxembourg en 1874 (Paris: Éditions des musées nationaux, 1974), 136; Exposition universelle de 1867 à Paris, 11, 12, 25, 35, 46. 63 These two were Eastman Johnson’s painting, Wounded Drummer Boy, lent by the Century, and J. Q. A. Ward’s sculpture, The Indian Hunter and His Dog, lent by the Central Park Museum. 64 Leslie, Report on the Fine Arts, 18. 65 For an in-depth analysis of the French political organization of the Universal Exposition of 1867, see Mainardi, Art and Politics of the Second Empire, 123–97. 66 Leslie, Report on the Fine Arts, 41–2. Of the twenty-five jurors serving on the international jury, Leslie noted that twelve of them were French, and all four French winners of the Medal of Honor were on the painting jury. Hoppin was the only American juror. See Leslie, 6. 67 For Rousseau, see Simon Kelly, Théodore Rousseau and the Rise of the Modern Art Market: An Avant-Garde Landscape Painter in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021); Jan Dirk Baetens, Voor vorst en vaderland een nieuwe lezing van de muurschilderingen van Henri Leys in het Antwerpse stadhuis (Kortrijk Drukkerij Groeninghe 2012). 68 “The Paris Exposition: Napoleon’s Industrial Triumph,” New York Times, June 9, 1867, 4. 69 G. A. T., New York Tribune, May 2, 1867, 1. 70 Leslie, Report on the Fine Arts, 16. In contrast, American artists exhibited only a few paintings each. Hunt was the only American who had more than four paintings on exhibit. Whistler exhibited more works than Hunt, but mainly etchings rather than paintings. 71 Jarves, Art Thoughts, 297. 72 Ibid., 259. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid., 258. 75 Ibid., 261, 268–9. Jarves’s collection is now at the Yale University Art Gallery. 76 Exposition universelle de 1867 à Paris, 25. See also Gerald Ackerman, The Life and Work of Jean-Léon Gérôme: With a Catalogue Raisonné (New York: Sotheby’s Publications, 1986), 218. 77 Lloyd Kramer, Nationalism in Europe & America: Politics, Cultures, and Identities since 1775 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 5. 78 Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, 36.

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Chapter 3 Henry James, “Parisian Topics,” New York Tribune, February 19, 1876, reprinted in The Painter’s Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts, ed. John L. Sweeney (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 109. This quotation referred to A. T. Stewart’s purchase of Meissonier’s Friedland, 1807, for $60,000 plus a bill of $8,000 in US customs fees to send the picture to New York. 2 Henry James, The American (New York: Scribner & Sons, 1907), 27. The American initially appeared as a novel published in twelve installments in the Atlantic Monthly between June 1876 and May 1877. 3 James, The American, 28. 4 Ibid., 21. 5 Lois Marie Fink, “French Art in the United States, 1850–1870: Three Dealers and Collectors,” Gazette des beaux-arts 92 (September 1978): 87–100. Fink also includes the French dealer, Cadart, who held an exhibition in New York of French works in 1866. This exhibition included many prints and paintings by artists such as Corot, Claude Monet, Eugène Boudin, and Gustave Courbet. Sculptors represented were Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, Antoine-Louis Barye, and Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi. I am not including Cadart as a major influence because the artists associated with him were not heavily collected here, with the exception of Corot and Barye. For Goupil, see Agnès Penot, “The Perils and Perks of Trading Art Overseas: Goupil’s New York Branch,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 16, no. 1 (2017); Penot, La maison Goupil, galerie d’art internationale au XIXème siècle (Paris: Mare & Martin, 2016); Penot, “The Goupil & Cie Stock Books: A Lesson on Gaining Prosperity through Networking,” Getty Research Journal 2 (2010): 177–82. 6 For biographical information on Knoedler, see DeCourcy E. McIntosh, “Goupil and the American Triumph of Jean-Léon Gérôme,” in Gérôme & Goupil: Art and Enterprise (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux; New York: Dahesh Museum of Art, 2000), 31–3. See also the short essay written by Knoedler’s grandson: Charles Henschel, “A Personal History of Knoedler,” in The Rise of the Art World in America: Knoedler at 150 (New York: Knoedler & Company, 1996), 9–15. The thirteen Paris Goupil et cie. stock books and the Knoedler Archives are available online from the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA. New York dealer William Schaus’s stock books are no longer extant. For a summary of Schaus’s activities, see Malcolm Goldstein, Landscape with Figures: A History of Art Dealing in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 38–40. 7 Goldstein, Landscape with Figures, 38–9. 8 “The Late Mr. Knoedler,” World (New York) 18 April 1878, 5. 1

160 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19

20 21

Notes M. Knoedler & Co. records, Sales Painting Book 1 1863–1867; pp. 183,185, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA (hereafter GRI). M. Knoedler & Co. records, Sales Painting Book 1 1863–1867; Painting Stock and Consignments, 1872–1881, GRI. Pamela M. Fletcher, “Creating the French Gallery: Ernest Gambart and the Rise of the Commercial Art Gallery in Mid-Victorian London,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (Spring 2007), http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/ spring07/143-creating-the-french-gallery-ernest-gambart-and-the-rise-of-thecommercial-art-gallery-in-mid-victorian-london, accessed 29 December 2014. See Jeremy Maas, Gambart: Prince of the Victorian Art World (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1975), 70–7. John Durand, The Life and Times of A. B. Durand (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894; repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), 193. See Annette Blaugrund, The Tenth Street Studio Building (Southampton: Parrish Art Museum, 1997). “Foreign Correspondence, Items, Etc.,” Crayon 7, no. 10 (October 1860): 296. Catalog of Paintings Never before Exhibited (New York: Henry H. Leeds & Co., 1864). Collection of Oil Paintings by American Artists (New York: Henry H. Leeds & Miner, 1867); and Catalogue of the Entire Art Library of Mr. S. P. Avery (New York: Bangs, Merwin & Co., 1867). There were 693 lots of books. He sold his copies of James Jackson Jarves’s Art Hints (1855) (lot 459) and Henry Tuckerman’s Artist-Life (lot 518). A number of art journals in his collection provide evidence of his efforts to stay abreast of current events in the art world. These included the Bulletin of the American Art-Union, Fine Arts Quarterly Review, and a complete set of the Art Journal (London) (lot numbers 446 and 667, 438, and 436, respectively); Collection of Oil Paintings by American Artists, cover page. Madeleine Fidell-Beaufort, Herbert L. Kleinfield, and Jeanne K. Welcher, “Introduction,” in The Diaries 1871–1882 of Samuel P. Avery (New York: Arno Press, 1979), xxii. Editorials and Resolutions in Memory of Samuel Putnam Avery (New York: Privately Printed, 1905), 12. Samuel P. Avery, The Diaries 1871–1882 of Samuel P. Avery, ed. Madeleine FidellBeaufort, Herbert L. Kleinfield, and Jeanne K. Welcher (New York: Arno Press, 1979); and George A. Lucas, Diary of George A. Lucas: An American Art Agent in Paris, 1857–1909, ed. Lilian M. C. Randall, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). Lilian M. C. Randall, “Introduction,” in Diary of George A. Lucas, 1: 18. Fidell-Beaufort, Kleinfield, and Welcher, “Introduction,” xxii; Madeleine FidellBeaufort and Jeanne K. Welcher, “Some Views of Art Buying in New York in the 1870s and 1880s,” Oxford Art Journal 5, no. 1 (1982): 49.

Notes

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22 Letter dated January 17, 1868 from Adolphe Goupil to Samuel P. Avery, MS box 07, folder 31, The Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, https://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15324coll13/id/2925 (accessed July 14, 2022). 23 See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 28–30. 24 “Fine Arts,” New York Times, February 7, 1868, 7. The pictures were on view, free and open to the public, in Avery’s gallery at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street. The exhibition was open from 9:00 a.m. until dark and on Monday evenings until 10:00 p.m. 25 Catalogue of French Paintings and Other Works of Art Selected by S. P. Avery (New York: Somerville Art Gallery, 1868), 1. 26 Ibid., 2. 27 “Picture-Buying,” Crayon 1, no. 7 (February 14, 1855): 100. 28 Unfortunately, the sale price for The Reading, the gem of the sale, was not recorded in the annotated catalog. See Catalogue of French Paintings and Other Works of Art Selected by S. P. Avery, 25. The prices for most of the works in this catalog are noted in the margins of an annotated copy of the catalog in the Thomas J. Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 29 S. S. Conant, “Fine Arts,” Putnam’s Monthly 11, no. 3 (March 1868): 385. 30 Henry T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, 2nd ed. (New York: G. P. Putnam & Son, 1867), 21. 31 Raymond Westbrook, “Open Letters from New York,” Atlantic Monthly 41, no. 243 (January 1878): 95. Knoedler & Co. closed its doors in 2011. 32 Samuel P. Avery to John Taylor Johnston, July 31, 1872, transcribed and published in Fidell-Beaufort and Welcher, “Some Views of Art Buying,” 54. 33 Charles Blanc, “Exposition universelle. Beaux-arts—peinture,” Le Temps, June 5, 1867, 1–2. 34 These averages are based on all the works sold to Europeans or Americans in the Goupil books. Goupil & Cie and Boussod, Valadon & Co. Records, books 2–13, GRI. 35 Randall, “Introduction,” 1: 8. 36 Goupil sold seven paintings by Cabanel in the 1870s, three of them to Americans. Goupil book 5, p. 163; book 6, pp. 61, 186; book 9, p. 14. 37 Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, 36. 38 “Literature and Art: The Trade in Bogus Pictures,” Current Literature 45, no. 1 (1908): 45. 39 An exception is Corot. Fake paintings by Corot counted in the thousands, according to the famous phrase, “Corot painted 3,000 canvases, 10,000 of which have been sold in America.” See René Huyghe, “Simple histoire de 2,414 faux

162

Notes

Corots,” L’Amour de l’art 17 (1936): 73. See also American critic Sheridan Ford’s cynical account of forgeries in the New York art market. Sheridan Ford, Art: A Commodity (New York: [Press of Rogers & Sherwood], 1888), 35–7. 40 The Legion of Honor was ranked as follows, from lowest to highest: Cross of the Legion of Honor, Officer of the Legion, Commander of the Legion of Honor, and Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor. In 1889, Meissonier became the first artist to receive the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, an honor rarely awarded to artists. Gérôme would receive it in 1900 and Bouguereau in 1903. 41 Gérôme and Bouguereau had both decorated Parisian churches. Cabanel painted twelve panels depicting allegories of the months for the Salon of the Caryatids in the Hôtel de Ville and a panel for the Palais du Sénat in the Luxembourg Palace. Prominent Parisian businessmen commissioned Bouguereau, Gérôme, and Cabanel for private decorative paintings. Gérôme painted the Chapel of Saint Jérôme in Saint-Séverin; and Bouguereau, Saint-Augustin and the Chapel of Saint Louis in Sainte-Clotilde. Gérôme contributed decorative panels for Prince Napoleon’s Pompeiian palace. Bouguereau and Cabanel decorated the residence of the prominent banker, Émile Pereire. Cabanel also painted decorative works for the mansion of banker Constant Say, and Bouguereau painted decorations for the mansion of businessman, Etienne Bartholoni. 42 For more information on the reforms, see Albert Boime, “The Teaching Reforms of 1863 and the Origins of Modernism in France,” Art Quarterly n.s. 1, no. 1 (Autumn 1977): 1–39. 43 See Lois Marie Fink, American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons (Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art Smithsonian Institution; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 113–289; H. Barbara Weinberg, “Nineteenth-Century American Painters at the École des Beaux-Arts,” American Art Journal 13, no. 4 (Autumn 1981): 76, 78, 80–1; Weinberg, The Lure of Paris: Nineteenth-Century American Painters and Their French Teachers (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991); Bailey Van Hook, Angels of Art: Women and Art in American Society, 1876–1914 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). 44 M. Knoedler & Co. records, Sales Painting Box 65, Book 5 1881–1885, p. 186, GRI. 45 During that period, the highest price, $25,000, went for works by Eugène Delacroix and Ludwig Knaus. The next highest price, $20,000 was paid for a Rembrandt painting, which indicated a growing interest in the Old Master market. M. Knoedler & Co. records, Sales Painting Box 66, Book 6 1885–1892, pp. 236, 209, 262, 21, 33, 244, GRI. 46 Avery, Avery Diaries, 574. This portrait was rediscovered at the Museum of the City of New York in 2017. I thank Bruce Weber for alerting me of his discovery. 47 Lucas, Diary of George A. Lucas, 2: 497–9. 48 Avery, Avery Diaries, 828, 860, 864, 884, 906, 917.

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49 Lucas, Diary of George A. Lucas, 2: 492, 499, 517, 528–9, 577, 582. 50 Ibid., 2: 499, 519, 531, 582. Desdemona cost 4,000 francs (492). 51 Ibid., 2: 536, 559, 609, 620, 624. Toward the end of the decade, Lucas visited Cabanel only a few times; he attended Cabanel’s funeral in January 1889. 52 Ripley Hitchcock, “The Stewart Paintings,” Art Review 1, no. 4 (February 1887): 4–5. 53 For Wolfe, see Anne McNair Bolin, “Art and Domestic Culture: The Residential Art Gallery in New York City, 1850-1870” (PhD diss., Emory University, 2000), 100–4. For Seney, see Henry J. Duffy, “New York City Collections 1865–1895” (PhD diss., Rutgers, 2001), 101–22. 54 “Art Notes,” The American 5, no. 130 (3 February 1883): 270. 55 Samuel P. Avery, “Some Notes on the History of Fine Arts in New York City during the Past Fifty Years [1883],” in History of New York City, Embracing an Outline Sketch of Events from 1609 to 1830, and a Full Account of Its Development from 1830 to 1884, ed. Benson John Lossing (New York: Perine Company, 1884), 842–3. 56 Frank Leslie and Frank H. Norton, Frank Leslie’s Historical Register of the United States Centennial Exposition, 1876 (New York: Frank Leslie’s Pub. House, 1877), 6. 57 “Fine Arts,” New York Times, November 5, 1872, 2. 58 Mr. Belmont’s Collection of Fine Modern Paintings (New York: George A. Leavitt & Co., [November 12, 1872]). 59 See Stanley Mazaroff, A Paris Life, a Baltimore Treasure: The Remarkable Lives of George A. Lucas and His Art Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 111–14. 60 Samuel P. Avery, “Notice,” in The Collection of Paintings, Drawings and Statuary, Property of John Taylor Johnston, Esq. . . . (New York: 1876), n. p. 61 See Eugene Benson, “Pictures in the Private Galleries of New York: Gallery of John Taylor Johnston,” Putnam’s Monthly 16, no. 31 (July 1870): 86. 62 Anatole Demidoff (1813–1870), Prince of San Donato, was a major art patron. Although Russian, he grew up in Paris and kept his art collection in the Villa San Donato near Florence, Italy. 63 An American landscape was the most expensive painting of the evening: Frederick Edwin Church’s Niagara Falls sold to the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, for $12,500, reported to be the highest price reached for a work at auction. This picture originally belonged to William T. Blodgett, who bought it in 1859 for $10,000. 64 “Notes,” Art Journal (New York) n.s., 3, no. 2 (1877): 63. 65 Fidell-Beaufort believed that this sale marked a real turning point in collecting, but collectors had already begun collecting French art by the time of the exposition; see Fidell-Beaufort and Welcher, “Some Views of Art Buying,” 52. 66 Catalogue of the A. T. Stewart Collection of Paintings, Sculptures, and Other Objects of Art (New York: American Art Association, 1887); Priced Catalogue of the Art

164

67

68 69 ­70 71 72 73

74 75 76 77

78 79 80

81

Notes Collection Formed by the Late Mrs. Mary J. Morgan (New York: American Art Galleries, 1886). See Samantha Deutch’s forthcoming book on Mary Jane Morgan. Morgan visited Vanderbilt’s collection. Avery hinted that her visit was comparative, as she had built up a “choice collection,” and he offered her a painting by Meissonier larger than those in the Vanderbilt collection. See Letter dated December 7 [1883], series 9, Thomas Ellis Kirby Personal Papers, box 16, folder 14, Mary Jane Morgan Art Collection (March 3–15, 1886), 1886, American Art Association Records, circa 1853–1929, bulk circa 1885–1922. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. “Mrs. Morgan’s Paintings,” New York Times, February 14, 1886, 6. “A French Account of the Morgan Sale,” Art Amateur 17, no. 1 (June 1887): 12. “Art Notes,” Art Journal (London) n.s. 12, no. 5 (1886): 159. “The Art Sale Finished,” New York Times, March 6, 1886, 5. M. Knoedler & Co. records, Sales Painting Box 65, Book 5 1881–1885, GRI. James Jackson Jarves, “Museums of Art, Artists, and Amateurs in America,” Galaxy 10, no. 1 (July 1870): 57–8. Sophia Antoinette Walker, “Fine Arts: The Painting Master in the Wolfe Collection,” Independent 46, no. 2383 (August 2, 1894): 12. “Mrs. A. T. Stewart Dead,” New York Times, October 26, 1886, 1; “Mrs. Stewart’s Funeral,” New York Times, October 27, 1886, 5; and “Mrs. Stewart’s Millions,” New York Times, November 2, 1886, 5. “The Stewart Art Gallery,” Harper’s Weekly 23, no. 1166 (May 3, 1879): 350. Catalogue of the A. T. Stewart Collection of Paintings, 101. “The A. T. Stewart Picture Sale,” Art Amateur 16, no. 6 (May 1887): 145. In a 1949 survey of museum guards, Bonheur’s Horse Fair ranked highest as visitors’ most asked-for painting. “Paintings Asked for Most Frequently by Visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Paintings—Misc 1869, 1872, 1883, 1896, 1917, 1931, 1949 P1650, Office of the Secretary Subject Files, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives, New York, NY. Montezuma [Montague Marks], “My Note Book,” Art Amateur 16, no. 6 (May 1887): 122. I entered the sales results of each of these auctions using priced catalogs and/or published results. Mr. Belmont’s Collection of Fine Modern Paintings. I used the priced catalog at the Frick Art Reference Library. The total amount, $81,076, differed from what Avery reported, $52,250. Henry H. Leeds & Co., Catalogue of a Private Collection of Original Modern Oil Paintings and Water Color Drawings Belonging to J. Wolfe . . . To Be Sold by Auction . . . December, 1863 (New York, 1863); Catalogue of Mr. John Wolfe’s Gallery of Valuable Paintings (New York: G. A. Leavitt & Co., 1882); Modern Paintings (New York: Fifth Avenue Art Galleries, 1894); Catalogue of Modern Paintings, Water Colors, Etchings, and Engravings: Belonging to the Estate of the Late George I. Seney (New York: The Association, 1894).

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82 Catalogue of Mr. George I Seney’s Collection of Modern Paintings (New York: J. J. Little & Co., 1885). The sale catalog had 285 lots, but I found results for 283. Five of those were watercolors, which I did not count in the totals. 83 Collection of George I. Seney (New York: J. J. Little & Co., 1891). The sale had 307 lots, but I found results for 293 lots totaling $659,448. The reported total for 307 lots was $665,550. 84 Carolyn Kinder Carr, “Prejudice and Pride: Presenting American Art at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition,” in Revisiting the White City: American Art at the 1893 World’s Fair (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1993), 106–8. 85 For an extensive study of American art collecting during this period, see Linda Henefield Skalet, “The Market for American Painting in New York: 1870-1915” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1980). 86 “The Seney Sale,” Collector 5, no. 8 (February 15, 1894): 124. 87 Kimberly Orcutt, “Buy American? The Debate over the Art Tariff,” American Art 16, no. 3 (Autumn 2002): 82–91. 88 Ibid., 83. 89 “A Letter from Gérôme” New York Times, December 18, 1884, 4; Henry Marquand, “Are Pictures Luxuries?” New York World, April 22, 1883, 5; “The Duty on Works of Art” Harper’s Weekly 30 (February 13, 1886): 99. The government eliminated the tariff between 1895 and 1897 but passed the Dingley tariff in 1897, which reintroduced import duties of 15 to 20 percent. 90 Douglas Steeples and David O. Whitten, Democracy in Desperation: The Depression of 1893 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 88. 91 See Randall, “Introduction,” 1: 20. 92 Charles W. Larned, “French Art,” Studio 2, no. 46 (November 17, 1883): 223. 93 Alfred Stevens, Impressions on Painting, trans. Charlotte Adams (New York: George J. Coombes, 1886), vi. 94 E. Durand-Gréville, “Private Picture-Galleries of the United States,” Connoisseur 2, no. 2 (December 1887): 90. ­95 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital (1986),” in Education: Culture, Economy and Society, ed. A. H. Halsey et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 54. 96 Letter dated December 21, 1856, from August Belmont to Commodore Matthew Perry. Folder for the year 1856, Belmont Family papers, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York, NY. 97 Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, 323. 98 “The Fine Arts: The Belmont Collection,” Belmont scrapbook of newspaper clippings, loose, no page numbers, presumably about March 19, 1864, when he held an exhibition concert in his home for the Sanitary Fair. August Belmont (1813–1890) collection, MS 2958.738, The New-York Historical Society, New York, NY.

166

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Chapter 4 1

Eugene Benson, “Pictures in the Private Galleries of New York: Gallery of John Taylor Johnston,” Putnam’s Monthly 16, no. 31 (July 1870): 81. 2 Jonathan E. Schroeder, “Visual Consumption in an Image Economy,” in Elusive Consumption, ed. Karin Ekstrom and Helene Brembeck (New York: Berg, 2004). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=499082, accessed June 23, 2014. 3 Wolfe’s home was at 13 Madison Avenue at 24th Street, and Morgan’s was 7 East 26th Street. The National Academy of Design was at 23rd Street and Fourth Avenue. The American Art Association auction galleries were at 6 East 23rd Street across from Morgan’s home on Madison Square, making shopping convenient. Avery’s gallery was at 86 Fifth Avenue, just above 14th Street and later at 4 East 38th Street. 4 Charles de Kay, “An American Gallery,” Magazine of Art 9 (1886): 249. 5 “Mrs. Morgan’s Works of Art,” The Sun, February 14, 1886, 9. Macleod attributed the unsigned article to Charles Dana, the editor of The Sun. See Dianne Sachko Macleod, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800-1940 (University of California Press, 2008), 47. 6 Montezuma [Montague Marks], “My Note Book,” Art Amateur 13, no. 5 (October 1885): 88. 7 Thomas Kirby, “Art Under the Hammer,” unpublished manuscript, page 35-D, series 9, Thomas Ellis Kirby Personal Papers, box 16, folder 14, Mary Jane Morgan Art Collection (March 3–15, 1886), 1886, American Art Association Records, circa 1853–1929, bulk circa 1885–1922. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 8 “Mrs. Morgan’s Paintings,” New York Times, February 14, 1886, 6. 9 Catalogue of the Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1902), 181. 10 Catalogue of Modern Paintings to Be Sold by Auction by the Order of the Executors of the Late Mr. John Wolfe (New York: Ortgies, 1894), 2. 11 Margaret Laster, “Catharine Lorillard Wolfe: Collecting and Patronage in the Gilded Age” (PhD. diss. Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2013), 65–6. 12 Henry H. Leeds & Co., Catalogue of a Private Collection of Original Modern Oil Paintings and Water Color Drawings Belonging to J. Wolfe . . . To Be Sold by Auction . . . December, 1863 (New York, 1863); Catalogue of Mr. John Wolfe’s Gallery of Valuable Paintings (New York: G. A. Leavitt & Co., 1882); Catalogue of Modern Paintings to Be Sold by Auction by the Order of the Executors of the Late Mr. John Wolfe (1894).

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13 For the Belmont and Huntington collections, I referred to the inventory lists in Edward Strahan [Earl Shinn], Art Treasures of America, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: George Barrie, 1879–1882), Belmont 1: 118; Huntington 2: 102. Huntington’s collection was in volume two published in 1880, but I include his collection in the 1870s because Shinn would already have seen and cataloged it by then. For Johnston, Morgan, and Stewart, I analyzed auction sale catalogs of 1876, 1886, and 1887, respectively. The Collection of Paintings, Drawings and Statuary, the Property of John Taylor Johnston, Esq. (New York: Somerville Art Gallery, 1876); Priced Catalogue of the Art Collection Formed by the Late Mrs. Mary J. Morgan (New York: American Art Galleries, 1886); Catalogue of the A. T. Stewart Collection of Paintings, Sculptures, and Other Objects of Art (New York: American Art Association, 1887). Huntington’s only catalog was published in 1896. By that time, the composition of his and Arabella’s collection evolved and included more old master paintings. Description of Pictures Belonging to Collis Potter Huntington, 3 vols. (New York: S. I., 1896). For Vanderbilt, I consulted Catalogue of the W.H. Vanderbilt Collection of Paintings (New York: De Vinne Press, 1886). For Wolfe, see Metropolitan Museum of Art, Part I. The Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection; Part II. Pictures by Old Masters, in the East Galleries (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1887). Please note names of works from the original handbook may not be the same names used today. 14 Because I was unable to view images of every work in the seven collections, I relied partly on titles and artists’ typical subject matter. Therefore, some works may have been placed in an incorrect category. 15 Many of the Orientalist, religious, historical, and military subjects can be considered subsets of genre paintings, but since the subjects are distinct, I assigned them as separate categories. 16 Letter dated July 31, 1858, from Adolphe Yvon to unnamed correspondent, 1978-A.2804, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris, France. The letter, addressed to “Monsieur,” thanks him for his visit to Yvon’s studio and hopes that the painting for Stewart will satisfy him. Although George Lucas seems the likely recipient, there is no indication in his diary entries in 1858 that he was the visitor, nor is Yvon’s name listed in the Goupil stock books in 1858 (Book 2 1856–1875). 17 The small version was auctioned off in the 1887 Stewart sale and ultimately donated to the St. Louis Art Museum. The large version currently hangs behind the stage in Chancellors Hall in the State Education Building, Albany, NY. See “Alexander Turney Stewart,” Frank Leslie’s Popular Illustrated Monthly 1, no. 6 (June 1876): 6; “The Art Gallery,” New York Times, April 12, 1876, 8; “The United States,” Harper’s Weekly 14 (July 9, 1870): 440–1.

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18 “Art, Music, and the Drama,” Appleton’s Journal of Literature, Science and Art 3, no. 56 (April 23, 1870): 471. 19 “Alexander Turney Stewart,” Frank Leslie’s Popular Illustrated Monthly 1, no. 6 (June 1876): 646. 20 By 1870, there were actually thirty-seven states in the Union. 21 “The Stewart Art Gallery,” Harper’s Weekly (May 3, 1879): 350. 22 “Yvon’s Great Picture, ‘the Genius of America,’ on Exhibition at the New Ball Room of the Grand Union Hotel, Saratoga Springs, N.Y.” (Saratoga, NY: s.n. [c. 1870]). An interactive website is available on the New York State Museum’s website at http:// www.nysm.nysed.gov/geniusofamerica/. This pamphlet was reprinted in Stewart’s sale catalog. 23 Ibid., n. p. 24 Ibid., n. p. 25 See Thomas B. Brumbaugh, “‘The Genius of America’: Adolphe Yvon’s Remarkable Picture,” Southeastern College Art Conference Review 11, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 9–13; Casey Seiler, “1870 Mural ‘Genius of America’ on Display after Controversy,” Times Union, January 13, 2013; Jeff Durstewitz, “Work of Genius: A Landmark Victorian Mural Is a Link to Saratoga’s Gilded Past,” Saratoga Living (Fall 2013): 11–13. 26 Explication ouvrages de peinture et dessins, sculpture, architecture et gravure des artistes vivants (Paris: Charles de Nourgues, Frères, 1870), 391–2. 27 Arlene B. Hirschfelder and Paulette Fairbanks Molin, The Extraordinary Book of Native American Lists (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012), 170. I thank my mother who mentioned this during a phone call on February 22, 2015. 28 “Gallery and Studio: The A. T. Stewart Collection, Third and Concluding Notice,” Art Amateur 16, no. 5 (April 1887): 101; “Alexander Turney Stewart: The Story of a Hundred Millions,” Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly 1, no. 6 (June 1876): 646; L. H. H., “Our Monthly Gossip,” Lippincott’s Magazine of Literature, Science, and Education 6 (September 1870): 332–6; “Mr. A. T. Stewart’s Ridiculous Picture,” The Sun, July 20, 1870, 3. See also Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 5: 1872– 1873, ed. Lin Salamo and Harriet Elinor Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 617. Mark Twain sarcastically reported that Stewart “paid $20,000 for that vast artistic outrage that hangs in his house.” See also “Mr. A. T. Stewart’s Ridiculous Picture,” 3. 29 René Ménard, “Salon de 1870,” Gazette des beaux-arts 3 (June 1, 1870): 500–1; “The A. T. Stewart Collection,” Art Amateur 16, no. 4 (March 1887): 80. 30 A. Saule, “Genre Pictures,” Aldine 9, no. 1 (1878): 20, 22. Eric Zafran, who calls genre, “anecdotal subject matter,” explained that genre painting became popular early in the nineteenth century in France. See Eric M. Zafran, Cavaliers and Cardinals: Nineteenth-Century French Anectodal Paintings (Cincinnati: Taft Museum, 1992), 5–7, 23–6.

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31 See Barbara Dayer Gallati, ed., Making American Taste: Narrative Art for a New Democracy (New York: New-York Historical Society; London: In association with D Giles Ltd., 2011). This exhibition provided a broad overview of the types of genre paintings that appealed to antebellum collectors. 32 J. Meredith Neil, Toward a National Taste: America’s Quest for Aesthetic Independence (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1975), 2. Ryan T. A. Swihart, “An Ornament and a Promise: Discourses on Culture in Nineteenth-Century America” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2008). Swihart used the phrase “public morality” as recommended by art historian Dr. Sally Webster. 33 Rebecca Bedell, “What Is Sentimental Art?,” American Art 25, no. 3 (2011): 9; Bedell, Moved to Tears: Rethinking the Art of the Sentimental in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 5–6. 34 Saule, “Genre Pictures,” 22. 35 Ibid., 20. 36 Albert Rhodes, “Views Abroad: A Day with the French Painters,” Galaxy 16, no. 1 (July 1873): 10. See also John C. Van Dyke, “Genre Painting in America,” Decorator and Furnisher 5, no. 5 (February 1885): 180. ­37 John Bascom, Aesthetics, or the Science of Beauty (Boston: Crosby & Ainsworth, 1867), 230. Bascom later became president of the University of Wisconsin. 38 Ibid., 231. 39 Anne McNair Bolin, “Art and Domestic Culture: The Residential Art Gallery in New York City, 1850–1870” (PhD diss., Emory University, 2000), 1–24, 195–9. 40 Bascom, Aesthetics, or The Science of Beauty. See also Swihart, “An Ornament and a Promise”; Daniel Timothy Lenehan, “Fashioning Taste: Earl Shinn, Art Criticism, and National Identity in Gilded Age America” (BA thesis, Haverford College, 2005), 54. 41 “The Conditions of Art in America,” North American Review 102, no. 210 (January 1866): 1, APSO. 42 Sven Beckert, “Institution-Building and Class Formation: How the NineteenthCentury Bourgeoisie Organized,” in The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Sven Beckert and Julia Rosenbaum (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 106; Louise L. Stevenson, The Victorian Homefront: American Thought and Culture, 1860–1880 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), xx. 43 “The Sale of the Johnston Gallery,” The Aldine 8, no. 10 (1877): 312. 44 “The Fine Arts: The Belmont Collection,” Belmont scrapbook of newspaper clippings, loose, no page numbers, presumably about March 19, 1864, when he held an exhibition concert in his home for the Sanitary Fair. August Belmont (1813–1890) collection, MS 2958.738, The New-York Historical Society, New York, NY.

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45 Bascom, Aesthetics, or The Science of Beauty, 237. 46 Herbert B. Adams, Public Libraries and Popular Education (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1900), 62. Adams was a Professor of American and institutional history at Johns Hopkins University 47 Macleod, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects, 46–51, 65–7. 48 Autobiographical notes, edited with biographical notes by Charles Nordhoff, n.d., ts, rev., holo [1886], Collis P. Huntington Archive, Special Collections, Syracuse University, series 4, reel 1, no. 2, p. 82. 49 David A. Pizarro, Brian Detweiler-Bedell, and Paul Bloom, “The Creativity of Everyday Moral Reasoning: Empathy, Disgust, and Moral Persuasion,” in Creativity and Reason in Cognitive Development, ed. J. C. Kaufman and J. Baer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 90. I thank Dr. Cameron Brewer for bringing this article to my attention. 50 Godfrey Wordsworth Turner, Homely Scenes from Great Painters (London: Cassell, Peter, & Galpin, 18–), 55. 51 Ibid. “The Belmont Gallery,” New York Tribune, April 5, 1864, 8. As Nancy Theriot has argued, motherhood became professionalized in the late nineteenth century, yet male artists continued to depict sentimental images of mothers. See Nancy Theriot, The Biosocial Construction of Femininity: Mothers and Daughters in NineteenthCentury America (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 133–56. 52 Turner, Homely Scenes from Great Painters, 55. 53 William Young and A. A. Turner, Lights and Shadows of New York Picture Galleries (New York and London: D. Appleton, 1864), plate XXVIII. 54 Letter dated January 23, 1886 from Belle Townley Smith to Mrs. C. C. “Doll” Buswell, George Walter Vincent Smith Museum Archives, Springfield, MA. 55 Laura L. Meixner, French Realist Painting and the Critique of American Society, 1865–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 2, 11. 56 In a psychological study of moral behavior, researchers found that guilt promoted “constructive, proactive pursuits,” such as support for benevolent associations and orphanages. See June Price Tangney, Jeff Stuewig, and Debra J. Mashek, “Moral Emotions and Moral Behavior,” Annual Review of Psychology 58 (January 2007): 349. I thank Dr. Cameron Brewer for bringing this article to my attention. 57 According to Weisberg, the French felt similarly nostalgic for disappearing agrarian life. Gabriel Weisberg, “The Narrative of the Fields and Streets: Nineteenth-Century Rural and Urban ­Imagery,” in Artist as Narrator: Nineteenth Century Narrative Art in England and France, ed. George Hardy (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma City Museum of Art; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 37. 58 “William H. Vanderbilt,” Magazine of Western History 8, no. 3 (July 1888): 245. Two collectors acquired different versions of Millet’s Sowers. Contemporaries knew

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Vanderbilt’s version, now in Japan, but the other version in the Quincy Adams Shaw collection remained virtually unknown in the collector’s lifetime. Shaw, a Boston recluse, owned more Millet paintings than any American at the time, but few people could see the works. The Shaw version is now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. 59 Meixner, French Realist Painting, 32. 60 I thank Andrea Lepage who made this suggestion. 61 I thank Mary Zawadzki for this reference to the St. Nicholas journals. See Ripley Hitchcock, “Millet and His Children,” St. Nicholas Magazine 14, no. 3 (1887): 167. 62 Swihart, “An Ornament and a Promise,” 33–4. 63 Benson, “Pictures in the Private Galleries of New York: Gallery of John Taylor Johnston,” 87. 64 Madeleine Fidell Beaufort, “Jules Breton in America: Collecting in the 19th Century,” in Jules Breton and the French Rural Tradition, ed. Hollister Sturges (Omaha, NB: Joslyn Art Museum: 1982), 51. 65 Clarence Cook, Art and Artists of Our Time, 3 vols., vol. 1 (New York: Selmar Hess, 1888), 78. 66 C. H. Stranahan, A History of French Painting (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1888), 392. 67 Cook, Art and Artists, 1: 78. 68 Bailey Van Hook, Angels of Art: Women and Art in American Society, 1876–1914 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 4. 69 Ibid., 16. 70 Ibid., 13. 71 Ibid., 7. 72 Jules Joseph Lefebvre’s Sappho is now in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada. ­73 Van Hook, Angels of Art, 29. 74 David C. Preyer, Art of the Metropolitan Museum of New York (Boston: L. C. Page & Co., 1909), 211–12. Also reprinted in Strahan, Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and Collection, 2: 19. Cabanel wrote his letter describing Pia de’ Tolomei to Samuel P. Avery, who then must have forwarded it to Vanderbilt; see letter dated December 10, 1876, Alexandre Cabanel to Samuel P. Avery, “Autograph Letters: European,” no. 46, Thomas J. Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 75 Lucy H. Hooper, “French Painters at Home,” Harper’s Bazaar 15, no. 26 (1882): 407. 76 David H. Wheeler, “Lovers in Shakespeare’s Plays,” Chautauquan 15, no. 5 (1892): 561–2. 77 “From the ‘Evening Express’,” in New Pictures at Avery’s Art Galleries (New York: n. p., 1879), 5.

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78 “From the ‘Evening Mail’: The Avery Art Rooms,” in New Pictures at Avery’s Art Galleries, 15. 79 “From the ‘Daily Times’: Pictures at Avery’s Gallery,” in New Pictures at Avery’s Art Gallery, 8. 80 “From the ‘Commercial Advertiser’: S. P. Avery’s New Gallery,” in New Pictures at Avery’s Art Gallery, 13. 81 “From the ‘Art Interchange’,” in New Pictures at Avery’s Art Gallery, 17. 82 Swihart, “An Ornament and a Promise,” 47–8. 83 Van Hook, Angels of Art, 8. 84 See Mathilde Benoistel, Sylvie Le Ray-Burimi, and Christophe Pommier, eds., France-Allemagne(s) 1870–1871: La guerre, la commune, les mémoires (Paris: Gallimard: Musée de l’Armée, 2017). See also François Robichon, Édouard Détaille: Un siècle de gloire militaire (Paris: B. Giovanangeli: Ministère de la défense, 2007); François Robichon, Alphonse de Neuville, 1835–1885 (Paris N. Chaudun: Ministère de la défense, Secrétariat général pour l’administration, Direction de la mémoire, du patrimoine et des archives, 2010); Alphonse Deneuville, dit de Neuville: SaintOmer 1835–Paris 1885 (Saint-Omer: Musée de l’Hôtel Sandelin, 1978). 85 Alfred de Lostalot, “Alphonse De Neuville,” Gazette des beaux-arts 2nd ser. 32 (August 1, 1885): 164. See also Robert Jay, “Alphonse De Neuville’s the Spy and the Legacy of the Franco-Prussian War,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 19/20 (1986): 151–62; François Robichon, “Representing the 1870–1871 War, or the Impossible Revanche,” in Nationalism and French Visual Culture, 1870–1914, ed. June Hargrove and Neil McWilliam (New Haven: Yale University Press; Washington, DC: National Gallery, 2005), 83–99. 86 “The A. T. Stewart Collection,” Art Amateur 16, no. 3 (February 1887): 55. 87 Adolphe Thiers, Histoire du Consulat et de l’Empire, 21 vols., vol. 7 (Paris: Paulin, 1847), 559–60, 600, 615. See also Constance Cain Hungerford, Ernest Meissonier: Master in His Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 157–60, 166–76. 88 Although Napoleon’s grandnephew, Charles Joseph Bonaparte, a “model citizen and patriotic American,” lived in Baltimore, critics made no connections between the French emperor and his American descendants. See Joseph Bucklin Bishop, Charles Joseph Bonaparte: His Life and Public Services (New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1922), 21. 89 Theodore Child, “The Meissonier Exhibition at Paris,” Art Amateur 11, no. 2 (1884): 31. 90 Elbert Hubbard, “Glimpses of Meissonier,” Journal of Education 48, no. 21 (1898): 352. 91 Child, “The Meissonier Exhibition at Paris,” 31.

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92 Ludwig Pietsch, “A German’s Estimate of Meissonier,” Connoisseur 2, no. 4 (1888): 171–2. 93 Some Americans sympathized with the Germans who were trying to unite their country, but also with the French people as victims of Napoleon III’s imperial ambitions. See Clara Eve Schieber, “The Transformation of American Sentiment Towards Germany, 1870–1914,” Journal of International Relations 12, no. 1 (July 1921): 50–74. 94 Historian Hugh Seton-Watson called this period an age of wars and unifications and reunifications, or the age of “official nationalisms,” including the United States. See Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism (London: Methuen, 1982), 148. ­95 “De Neuville and Berne-Bellecour,” Art Amateur 1, no. 6 (1879): 114. 96 Emilia F. S. Dilke, “France’s Greatest Military Artist,” The Cosmopolitan 11, no. 5 (1891): 518. 97 Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 192–5. 98 Edward Strahan [Earl Shinn], Art Treasures of America, 3 vols., vol. 3 (Philadelphia: George Barrie, 1879–1882), 99. 99 Bryson Burroughs, Catalogue of Paintings (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1914), 66. 100 Letter reprinted in Catalogue of the Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 131–2. Strahan gives a detailed account of each of the figures and their regiments. See Strahan, Art Treasures of America, 3: 99. 101 William H. Low, “The Vanderbilt Collection of Modern Pictures,” [1903], 62, unpublished manuscript, August F. Jaccaci Papers, 1889–1935, Archives of American Art; Strahan, Art Treasures of America, 3: 99. 102 “Is Art Independent of Truth?” Liberty (Not the Daughter but the Mother of Order) 5, no. 17 (March 31, 1888): 4, APSO. 103 “Alphonse de Neuville,” Art Amateur 13, no. 2 (July 1885): 23. 104 Auguste Alexandre Ducrot, La défense de Paris (1870–1871) (Paris: E. Dentu, 1876), 13–28. 105 “De Neuville and the Franco-Prussian War,” American Architect and Building News, no. 17 April (1886): 189. 106 Cook, Art and Artists, 1: 280. 107 “De Neuville and Berne-Bellecour,” Art Amateur 1, no. 6 (November 1879): 114. 108 Cook, Art and Artists, 1: 280. 109 Ibid., 1: 281.

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110 Henry Bacon, Parisian Art and Artists (Boston: James R. Osgood & Company, 1883), 29–30. 111 Morgan owned Hébert, Madonna and Child; Bouguereau, Madonna, Infant Saviour, and St. John; Scheffer, Christ in the Garden; Monticelli, Adoration of the Magi; Diaz, Holy Family; Decamps, Walk to Emmaus. 112 Priced Catalogue of the Art Collection Formed by the Late Mrs. Mary J. Morgan, deluxe edition, p. 202, lot 1388, p. 210, lot 1446. 113 Merle’s St. Elizabeth of Hungary is now in the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI. 114 The original painting is now lost, but the image remained popular and was copied well into the twentieth century See Francis Alÿs, The Fabiola Project, 1992–present. 115 Zafran, Cavaliers and Cardinals, 13–23. 116 Frederick W. Morton, “An Appreciation of Jehan Georges Vibert,” Brush and Pencil 10, no. 6 (September 1902): 325. 117 “Pictures from the Collection of the Late Catharine Lorillard Wolfe.” Studio n.s., 2, no. 2 (May 1887): 187–8. 118 Though the Shulamite was presumably painted to order for Wolfe in 1875, Lucy Hooper wrote that the Shulamite was begun ten years earlier at the request of the Empress Eugénie. According to Hooper, Cabanel could not find a suitable model, so he did not finish the painting. Then he took it up again for Wolfe. See Lucy H. Hooper, “Art in Paris,” Art Journal (New York) n.s., 2, no. 3 (1876): 90. 119 “Pictures from the Collection,” 188. 120 Montezuma [Montague Marks], “My Note Book,” Art Amateur 16, no. 6 (May 1887): 122. 121 “The Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Art Amateur 18, no. 1 (December 1887): 7; and “The Wolfe Pictures,” New York Times, November 7, 1887, 4. See also Strahan’s earlier assessment in Art Treasures 1: 120. 122 Edward Strahan [Earl Shinn], ed., A Collection of the Works of J. L. Gérome (New York: S. L. Hall, 1881), n.p. in the two-volume version. In the ten-volume version, it is in section six, n.p. 123 “Gérôme’s Sword-Dance,” Art Journal New Series, 3 (1877): 164. 124 “Some New Pictures” unidentified news clipping, Scrap book made by Stricker Jenkins, [Baltimore: s.n., n.d.] 2 v. v. 2, p. 74, Frick Art Reference Library, New York, NY, hereafter Stricker Jenkins Scrap Book. ­125 Heather D. Ward, Egyptian Belly Dance in Transition: The Raqs Sharqi Revolution, 1890–1930 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2018), 8, 47, 54. 126 Eugene Benson, “Jean Léon Gérome,” Galaxy 1, no. 7 (August 1, 1866): 585. 127 “Some New Pictures” unidentified news clipping, Stricker Jenkins Scrap Book [Baltimore: s.n., n.d.] 2 v. v. 2, p. 74. 128 “Fine Arts: Gerome and L’Almee” unidentified news clipping, Stricker Jenkins Scrap Book [Baltimore: s.n., n.d.] 2 v. v. 2, p. 75.

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129 Ainsley Hawthorn, “Middle Eastern Dance and What We Call It,” Dance Research 37, no. 1 (2019): 1–17. The dance became a main attraction first at the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris and then at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. 130 Today’s viewers recognize the fictions as Western fantasies, as articulated by Linda Nochlin and Edward Said. See Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (New York: Icon, 1989), 33–59; Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). 131 Strahan, Art Treasures, 1: 108. 132 John Charles Van Dyke, ed., Modern French Masters (New York: De Vinne Press, 1896; reprint, New York: Garland, 1976), 34. Gérôme’s entry by Will Hicock Low is on pp. 31–43; quoted in Glessner “Passing of Jean–Léon Gérôme,” Brush and Pencil 14 (April 1904): 62. 133 Van Hook, Angels of Art, 188–9. 134 Benson, “Pictures in the Private Galleries of New York: Gallery of John Taylor Johnston”, 82. 135 Strahan, Art Treasures, 1: 131. 136 “The Fine Arts. The Mary J. Morgan Collection (First Notice),” The Critic 112 (1886): 95. 137 Ibid. 138 Van Hook, Angels of Art, 155. 139 Bascom, Aesthetics, or The Science of Beauty, 231. 140 Barbara Dayer Gallati, “Taste, Art, and Cultural Power in Nineteenth-Century America” in Making American Taste: Narrative Art for a New Democracy, ed. Barbara Dayer Gallati (New York: New-York Historical Society; London: in association with D Giles Ltd., 2011), 16. 141 Bedell, Moved to Tears, 98–9. 142 Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, French Realism and the Dutch Masters: The Influence of Dutch Seventeenth-Century Painting on the Development of French Painting between 1830 and 1870 (Utrecht: Haentjens Dekker & Gumbert, 1974), 10. 143 Eliza Greatorex, Old New York, from the Battery to Bloomingdale (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1875). For more on Greatorex, see Katherine Manthorne, Restless Enterprise: The Art and Life of Eliza Pratt Greatorex (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021). 144 William Henry Vanderbilt’s son, George, purchased Eliza Greatorex’s Homes of Ober Ammergan from the American bookstore in Munich. See entry dated July 29, 1880, Vienna Grand Hotel, p. 55 in the travel journal of George W. Vanderbilt, courtesy of Lori Garst, Associate Curator, Biltmore Estate, Asheville, NC. 145 The Collection of Paintings, Drawings and Statuary, the Property of John Taylor Johnston, Esq. Eliza Greatorex’s drawings depicted Antwerp Cathedral, and a scene

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of Venice (p. 76, lots 294, 295). Johnston also owned four watercolors by three other artists: Elizabeth Murray’s Eleventh Hour watercolor (p. 74, lot 283); Girardin, Lilacs, watercolors (p. 73, lot 276) & Nasturtions [sic] (p. 63, lot 211); and Korner’s watercolor, Flowers (p. 71, lot 268). 146 Elizabeth Murray, Sixteen Years of an Artist’s Life in Morocco, Spain, and the Canary Islands, 2 vols. (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1859); The Modern System of Painting in Water-Colours from the Living Model (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1868). 147 Samuel P. Avery, The Diaries 1871–1882 of Samuel P. Avery, ed. Madeleine FidellBeaufort, Herbert L. Kleinfield, and Jeanne K. Welcher (New York: Arno Press, 1979), 295, 300. Avery mentions visiting Greatorex, 46, 152. 148 George A. Lucas, Diary of George A. Lucas: An American Art Agent in Paris, 1857–1909, ed. Lilian M. C. Randall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 2: 169, 171, 177. Girardin, Korner, Greatorex, Preyer, Murray, and Escallier are not mentioned in the Goupil stock books in 1864 (Book 2 1856–1875) or in M. Knoedler & Co. records, Sales Painting Book 1 1863–1867, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA. There are several entries for Girardin in the Goupil stock books between 1852 and 1860. See Book 1, pp. 28, 39, 40, 54–6. Several of her entries mention New York in the notes. I thank Mahsa Hatam, Special Collections Reading Room Supervisor, Getty Library, for assistance in locating these records. 149 Ibid., 2: 254–5. 150 Ibid., 2: 264. 151 Huntington loaned the painting to various exhibitions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1885. See Archer Milton Huntington diary entry dated January 1, 1889, Archer Milton Huntington Archive, Hispanic Society of America, New York, as quoted in Shelley Bennett, Art of Wealth: The Huntingtons in the Gilded Age (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library Press, 2013), 16, 67. 152 Nancy Scott, “America’s First Public Turner: How Ruskin Sold ‘the Slave Ship’ to New York,” British Art Journal 10, no. 3 (2009/2010): 69–77. 153 Huntingon owned Meyer von Bremen’s Convalescent, which depicted a young man reading to an older woman sitting up in her bed, listening attentively. Is she his grandmother? Is this an act of kindness? Morgan owned Leon y Escosura’s Convalescent Prince (1872).

Chapter 5 1

Samuel P. Avery, “Some Notes on the History of Fine Arts in New York City During the Past Fifty Years [1883],” in History of New York City, Embracing an Outline Sketch of Events from 1609 to 1830, and a Full Account of Its Development from 1830 to 1884, ed. Benson John Lossing (New York: Perine Company, 1884), 843.

Notes 2 3 ­4 5 6

7

8 9

10

­11

12 13

177

Edward Strahan [Earl Shinn], Art Treasures of America, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: George Barrie, 1879–1882). “Albert Spencer’s Pictures,” New York Times, February 18, 1888, 4. E. Durand-Gréville, “Private Picture-Galleries of the United States,” Connoisseur 2, no. 2 (December 1887): 89. Henry J. Duffy, “New York City Collections 1865–1895” (PhD diss., Rutgers, 2001). In Baltimore, William T. Walters and Stricker Jenkins opened their collections to visitors. See William S. Ayres, “The Domestic Museum in Manhattan: Major Private Art Installations in New York City, 1870–1920” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 1993); Anne McNair Bolin, “Art and Domestic Culture: The Residential Art Gallery in New York City, 1850–1870” (PhD diss., Emory University, 2000). Guests included collectors Marshall O. Roberts, George M. Vanderbilt, William B. Astor, A. Augustus Healy (Brooklyn), Robert L. Stuart, William T. Blodgett, William J. Hoppin, Stricker Jenkins (Baltimore), and Levi P Morton all visited his private art gallery. See John Taylor Johnston Visitor Books; gallery no. 8 Fifth Avenue, Box 10 folder 9, Visitor’s Book February 23, 1865 to April 1881. John Taylor Johnston Collection, 1832–1981, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives, Office of the Senior Vice President, Secretary and General Counsel, New York, NY. Hereafter John Taylor Johnston Collection, MMA Archives. “Art Notes,” The American 7, no. 180 (1884): 236. “A Noted Art Lover Dead,” The Sun, July 5, 1885, 5. For her friends, she had a catalog printed. See Mrs. Morgan’s Collection of Paintings (New York: Theo L. de Vinne, 1884). See also Samantha Deutch, “Lost Intentions: Mary J. Morgan’s Art “Treasures,” in “What’s Mine Is Yours”: Private Collectors and Public Patronage in the United States. Essays in Honor of Inge Reist, ed. Esmée Quodbach (New York: The Frick Art Reference Library; Center for Spain in America; Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2021), 167–8. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 2000), 125–6; Leanne Zalewski, “Art for the Public: William Henry Vanderbilt’s Cultural Legacy,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 11, no. 2 (Summer 2012), http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/summer12/leanne-zalewskiwilliam-henry-vanderbilts-cultural-legacy (accessed July 14, 2022). The Private Collection of W. H. Vanderbilt, 459 Fifth Avenue, New York (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1879); Collection of W. H. Vanderbilt, 640 Fifth Avenue, New York (New York: Putnam, 1882); Collection of W. H. Vanderbilt, 640 Fifth Avenue, New York (New York: s. n., 1884); Catalogue of the W.H. Vanderbilt Collection of Paintings (New York: De Vinne Press, 1886). “Art Notes,” 236. Avery, “Some Notes on the History of Fine,” 843.

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14 Letter dated December 21, 1856, from August Belmont to Commodore Matthew Perry, Belmont Family Papers, Box C10, Folder 12.21.1856, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York, NY. 15 “Sketchings: The Belmont Collection,” Crayon V (January 1858): 23; Eugene Benson, “Pictures in the Private Galleries of New York: Galleries of Belmont and Blodgett,” Putnam’s Monthly 5, no. 29 n.s. (May 1870): 534. 16 United States Department of the Treasury, Report of the Secretary of the Treasury on the State of the Finances, vol. 23 (Washington, DC, 1862/63), 346. I thank Brian Matzke at Elihu Burritt Library for locating this information. 17 “Sketchings: The Belmont Collection,” Crayon V (January 1858): 23; Eugene Benson, “Pictures in the Private Galleries of New York: Galleries of Belmont and Blodgett,” Putnam’s Monthly 5, no. 29 (May 1870): 534; “Belmont Pictures,” New York Times, February 8, 1858, 8. See also Bolin, 70. 18 Thomas S. Cummings, Historic Annals of the National Academy of Design (New York, 1865), 268. 19 “AHMC Belmont, August (1818–1890) Passport, letters, biography, exhibition ledger, 1858-1879,” folder 1 of 1, scrapbook March 1864, August Belmont (1813– 1890) collection, MS 2958.738, The New-York Historical Society, New York, NY. The US Sanitary Commission fairs raised money for Union soldiers during the American Civil War. 20 “Art Matters,” New York Times, April 12, 1867, 5. 21 “Fine Arts: The Belmont Gallery,” New York Tribune, April 21, 1870, 2. 22 “Notes,” Art Journal (New York) n.s., 3, no. 2 (1877): 63. See also Thomas BusciglioRitter, “‘Covetable Pictures’: John Taylor Johnston (1820-1893), Collecting Art between New York and Europe,” Journal of the History of Collections 32, no. 1 (2020): 84–5. 23 Calvin Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1989), 34. 24 “Notes,” Art Journal (New York) n.s., 3, no. 2 (1877): 63. 25 Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces, 34. 26 John Taylor Johnston Visitor Books; gallery no. 8 Fifth Avenue, Box 10 folder 9, Visitor’s Book February 23, 1865 to April 1881, John Taylor Johnston Collection, MMA Archives. Among the artists who visited were Eastman Johnson, Edward Lamson Henry, Winslow Homer, Eugene Benson, Emmanuel Leutze, Jervis McEntee, Jasper Crospey, Calvert Vaux, J. G. Brown, Samuel Colman, George Baker, Albert Bierstadt, Daniel Huntington, and Elihu Vedder. 27 Kimberly Orcutt, Power & Posterity: American Art at Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibition (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 169–91. 28 “Fine Arts,” Independent 28, no. 145 (October 19, 1876): 6.

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29 “Sayings and Doings,” Harper’s Bazaar 9, no. 30 (1876): 471. 30 Orcutt, Power & Posterity, 188–91. 31 “Fine Arts: The Loan Collection,” New York Times, June 25, 1876, 7. 32 Ibid.; “Sayings and Doings,” 471; “The Loan Exhibition,” Aldine 8, no. 8 (1877): 241; “The National Academy of Design: The New York Centennial Loan Exhibition,” Evening Post, June 19, 1876, 4. 33 “Sayings and Doings,” 471; “Fine Arts: The Centennial Loan Exhibitions,” Independent 28, no. 14 (July 6, 1876): 6. In the catalog, Pollice verso is listed as The Gladiators, and Chariot Race is listed as Race of the Charioteers. National Academy of Design New York Centennial Loan Exhibition (New York: National Academy of Design, 1876), 23. 34 “The National Academy of Design: The New York C ­ entennial Loan Exhibition,” 4. 35 “Fine Arts: The Loan Collection,” 7. 36 “Fine Arts,” Independent, 6. 37 Maureen O’Brien, In Support of Liberty: European Paintings at the 1883 Pedestal Fund Art Loan Exhibition (Southampton, NY: Parrish Art Museum, 1986), 36. 38 Catalogue of the Pedestal Fund Art Loan Exhibition at the National Academy of Design (New York: Theo. L. De Vinne & Co., 1883). Wolfe’s loans are on p.18; Avery’s on p. 20. “Pedestal Fund Loan Exhibition,” New York Times, May 20, 1883, 2. Montague Marks, writer for Art Amateur, served as Secretary. 39 “The Pedestal Art Loan,” New York Times, December 16, 1883, 5. 40 M. G. [Mariana Griswold] Van Rensselaer, “The Recent New York Loan Exhibition,” American Architect and Building News 15, no. 421 (1884): 29. 41 Ibid. 42 David B. Dearinger, “An Introduction to the History of American Art Criticism to 1925,” in Rave Reviews: American Art and Its Critics, 1826–1925, ed. David B. Dearinger (New York: National Academy of Design, 2000), 17–29. 43 “Sketchings: The Belmont Collection,” Crayon V (January 1858): 23. 44 “Fine Arts: The Belmont Gallery,” Albion 42, no. 14 (1864): 165. 45 Fuller-Walker, “Our Fine-Art Collections: The Belmont Gallery,” Aldine 9, no. 8 (1879): 258; “Our Fine-Art Collections: The Belmont Gallery II,” Aldine 9, no. 9 (1879): 274–5. 46 Eugene Benson, “Pictures in the Private Galleries of New York: Gallery of John Taylor Johnston,” Putnam’s Monthly 16, no. 31 (July 1870): 81–7; Benson, “Pictures in the Private Galleries of New York: Galleries of Belmont and Blodgett,” Putnam’s Monthly 15, no. 29 (May 1870): 534–41; and Benson, “Pictures in Private Galleries of New York: Gallery of Marshall O. Roberts,” Putnam’s Monthly 16, no. 34 (October 1870): 376–81. Recall that Johnston, Belmont, Blodgett, and Roberts were American committee members at the Universal Exposition of 1867.

180 4­ 7 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

­65 66 67 68

Notes Benson, “Pictures: Belmont and Blodgett,” 534. Benson, “Pictures: Belmont and Blodgett,” 537, 540. Ibid., 539. Benson, “Pictures: Johnston,” 81. Ibid., 86; and The Collection of Paintings, Drawings and Statuary: The Property of John Taylor Johnston, Esq. (New York: Somerville Art Gallery, 1876), 58. Benson, “Pictures: Johnston,” 86. “A. T. Stewart’s Purposes,” New York Observer and Chronicle (March 25, 1869): 94. “Art and Artists in Paris: Yvon’s Picture for A. T. Stewart,” New York Times, March 20, 1870, 3. Fuller-Walker, “The Stewart Art Gallery,” Aldine 7, no. 19 (1875): 369. “The Arts,” Appleton’s Journal 14, no. 345 (October 30, 1875): 569. “A. T. Stewart: By One Who Knew Him,” Harper’s Bazaar 9, no. 19 (May 6, 1876): 295. “The Stewart Art Gallery,” Harper’s Weekly 23, no. 1166 (May 3, 1879): 348–50. Artistic Houses, 2 vols., vol. 1 (New York, 1883–84), pt. 1, opp. 15. “Living American Artists III: Albert Bierstadt, N.A.,” Scribner’s Monthly 3, no. 5 (1872): 599. “Sale of Paintings: The Spencer Collection and Its Prices,” New York Times, April 4, 1879, 5. “The Sale of the Morgan Pictures,” Art Amateur 14, no. 5 (April 1886): 98. “The Stebbins Collection: All the Pictures Disposed of Last Evening,” New York Times, February 13, 1889, 5. Henry W. Blair, “A Noble Charity” American Journal of Education and National Educator, n.d. [1891] n. p. Misc. Huntington Family Clippings 1871–1909, HEH 16/11 folder 1, Henry Edwards Huntington Papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Hereafter, HEH Papers. The clipping identifies Huntington as seventy years old at the time. Blair was a senator of New Hampshire. “’Ich Kann Warten,’ A Little Story of One of C. P. Huntington’s Favorite Pictures,” Boston Herald, August 28, 1900, HEH Papers. Letter dated September 28, 1888 from Collis P. Huntington to Luigi Palma di Cesnola p. 261, Ledger Letter Books, 1888–1889, HEH 30/18, HEH Papers. J. O’H. Cosgrave, “An Impression of Collis P. Huntington,” The Wave, August 18, 1900, 12–13. E. Durand-Gréville, “Private Picture-Galleries of the United States,” Connoisseur 2, no. 2 (December 1887): 86–99; Durand-Gréville, “Private Picture-Galleries of the United States,” Connoisseur 2, no. 3 (March 1888): 137–42; Durand-Gréville, “French Pictures in America,” Studio 2, no. 2 (May 1887): 29–33; DurandGréville, “French Pictures in America,” Studio (n.s.) 3, no. 2 (August 1887): 30.

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See Durand-Gréville, “La peinture aux États-Unis: Les galeries privées,” Gazette des beaux-arts 36 (July 1887): 65–75; Durand-Gréville, “La peinture aux États-Unis: Les galeries privées,” Gazette des beaux-arts 36 (September 1887): 250–5. 69 E. Durand-Gréville, “French Pictures in America,” Studio (n.s.) 3, no. 2 (August 1887): 30. 70 Avery, “Some Notes on the History of Fine,” 843. 71 Various catalogs of his collection were published between 1879 and the late 1880s; see The Private Collection of W. H. Vanderbilt, 459 Fifth Avenue, New York (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1879); Collection of W. H. Vanderbilt, 640 Fifth Avenue, New York (New York: Putnam, 1882); Collection of W. H. Vanderbilt, 640 Fifth Avenue, New York (New York: n. p., 1884); and Catalogue of the W. H. Vanderbilt Collection of Paintings (New York: De Vinne Press, 1886). See also “Mr. Vanderbilt’s Gallery,” New York Times, December 10, 1885, 2; and “William H. Vanderbilt Collection,” Collector 1, no. 11 (April 1, 1890): 81–7. 72 “William H. Vanderbilt Collection,” 81. 73 Strahan, Art Treasures, 1: 99. The jury of the Salon of 1874, which included Cabanel, Meissonier, and Bouguereau, among others, awarded the Medal of Honor to Gérôme for his genre picture, L’Éminence grise. However, because Medals of Honor were generally awarded to history pictures, there was some ­controversy surrounding the award. Gérôme tried to return the medal, but the jury refused to accept it. See Ackerman, Life and Work of Jean-Léon Gérôme, 96. According to records from the École des beaux-arts, Gérôme gave the medal, worth $4,000, to a student fund at the École des beaux-arts; conseil supérieur de l’École des beauxarts, procès-verbaux, October 16, 1874, AJ 52 16, Archives nationales, Paris. See also Conseil supérieur de l’École des beaux-arts, procès-verbaux, October 23, 1882, no. 14, AJ 52 461, confirming the return of Gérôme’s medal. 74 Strahan, Art Treasures, 1: 24. 75 Lucy H. Hooper, “Art in Paris,” Art Journal 2, no. 3 (1876): 90. 76 C. W. S., “Protection of American Art,” Nation 38, no. 984 (May 8, 1884): 405. The writer implicated dealers in the downfall of American art in favor of European art. 77 “Art Notes,” Art Review 1, no. 4 (February 1887): 18. 78 Octave Mirbeau, “Nos bons artistes 1887,” in Esquisses en vue d’une histoire du Salon, ed. Gérard-Georges Lemaire (Paris: Henri Veyrier, 1986), 272. This essay was originally published in Le Figaro, December 23, 1887. 79 The Private Collection of W. H. Vanderbilt, 459 Fifth Avenue, New York (1879); Collection of W. H. Vanderbilt, 640 Fifth Avenue, New York (1882); Collection of W. H. Vanderbilt, 640 Fifth Avenue, New York (1884); Catalogue of the W.H. Vanderbilt Collection of Paintings (1886). 80 “The New Museum,” World, March 30, 1880, 1.

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81 See, for example Montezuma [Montague Marks], “My Note Book,” Art Amateur 9, no. 5 (October 1883): 91. 82 Deutch, “Lost Intentions,” 168–9. 83 Description of Pictures Belonging to Collis Potter Huntington, 3 vols. (New York: S. I., 1896). 84 Edward Strahan [Earl Shinn], William Vanderbilt’s House and Collection, 2 vols. (Boston: George Barrie, 1883–1884); Strahan [Shinn], Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and Collection, 4 vols. (Boston: G. Barrie, 1883–1884). 85 Invoice Book no. 2, receipts dated June 6, 1884, November 6, 1884, March 21, 1885, July 29, 1885, and March 17, 1886, Henry Clay Frick Papers, The Frick Collection/ Frick Art Reference Library Archives, New York City. The Frick Art Museum in Pittsburgh, PA, has twelve prints. I thank Emilia S. Boehm, Assistant Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Frick Art & Historical Center, Pittsburgh, for her assistance. 86 Strahan, Art Treasures of America, 1: 118, 2: 102, 3: 108. 87 The Publishers’ Trade List Annual (New York: F. Leypoldt, 1881), iv. 88 Strahan, Art Treasures. Stewart no. 42, William Astor no. 108, John Wolfe no. 115, p. ix; J. P. Morgan no. 292 and 293; John D. Rockefeller no. 410; Collis P. Huntington no. 461; Catharine Wolfe no. 487, p. x. August Belmont, William Henry Vanderbilt, John Taylor Johnston, and Mary Jane Morgan were not among the 1,000 subscribers for the Édition de luxe. 89 Edward Strahan [Earl Shinn], Masterpieces of the Centennial International Exhibition, 3 vols., vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Gebbie & Barrie, 1876–1878; repr., New York: Garland Publishing, 1977); The Chefs-d’oeuvre d’art of the International Exhibition, 1878 (Philadelphia: Gebbie & Barrie, 1878–1880). 90 Strahan, Études in Modern French Art, 9. 91 Strahan, Chefs-d’œuvre d’art 1878, 118; Strahan, Art Treasures, 1: 27–30. Strahan declared that art-loving Americans who admired Meissonier’s genius invaded his privacy at his Poissy home. 92 Strahan, Art Treasures, 1: 107–8. 93 Ibid., 1: 43–5. 94 Ibid., 1: 23, 39, 46, 48. 95 Ibid., 3: 116; 1: 126, 131–3. Strahan called Couture’s Soap Bubbles the Idle Scholar. 96 The major auction venues were the Somerville Art Gallery (Robert Somerville, auctioneer), Leavitt Art Galleries, and in the 1880s, the American Art Association (Thomas Kirby, auctioneer); see Henry J. Duffy, “New York City Collections 1865–1895” (PhD diss., Rutgers, 2001), 15, 18, 20. 97 Catalogue of the A. T. Stewart Collection of Paintings, Sculptures, and Other Objects of Art (New York: Little, 1887).

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­98 John Ott, “How New York Stole the Art Market: Blockbuster Auctions and Bourgeois Identity in Gilded Age America,” Winterthur Portfolio 42, no. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn 2008): 137. 99 Clara Erskine Clement and Laurence Hutton, Artists of the Nineteenth Century and Their Works, 2 vols. (Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1885); John Denison Champlin and Charles C. Perkins, eds., Cyclopedia of Painters and Paintings, 4 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1886–1887); C. H. Stranahan, A History of French Painting (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1888). 100 Louise L. Stevenson, The Victorian Homefront: American Thought and Culture, 1860–1880 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), xxiii. 101 “Financial: The Late Mr. Huntington,” Independent 52, no. 2699 (August 23, 1900): 2068. 102 Stranahan attended Mount Holyoke and Troy Female Seminaries, where she excelled at writing. Her husband served in the state legislature and United States Congress. 103 Clara Erskine Clement and Laurence Hutton, Artists of the Nineteenth Century and Their Works, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Osgood, and Co., 1879). The authors, Clara Erskine Clement (later Waters) traveled around the world and wrote numerous books on all periods of art. Writer and critic Laurence Hutton, a graduate of Yale and Princeton, also traveled around the world. Several years after the publication of this book, he became the literary editor of Harper’s Magazine. 104 Clement and Hutton, Artists of the Nineteenth Century and Their Works, 2, 111–12. 105 Ibid., Stranahan, A History of French Painting, 344. By comparison, thirty-seven works by Meissonier were listed in Strahan’s Art Treasures of America. 106 Champlin and Perkins, Cyclopedia of Painters and Paintings. Author Charles Callahan Perkins graduated from Harvard College in 1843, and lived abroad from 1855 until 1867 (the time of the two universal expositions). He was the first American to be elected to the French Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres, one of the five academies of the preeminent intellectual society, the Institut de France, founded in 1663. As a Corresponding Member of the French Institute with a legitimate and learned connection to Paris intellectuals, Perkins lent institutional capital to this project. Co-author John Denison Champlin, a Yale graduate, wrote for various periodicals, once founded a journal, and traveled abroad in 1884. “Charles C. Perkins,” Publisher’s Weekly, no. 761 (August 28, 1886): 243. 107 Publisher’s Weekly no. 775 (December 4, 1886), 903. 108 Champlin and Perkins, Cyclopedia of Painters and Paintings, 1:225. 109 Ibid., 1: 300. 110 Ibid., 1: 177–8.

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111 Clarence Cook, Art and Artists of Our Time, 3 vols., vol. 1 (New York: Selmar Hess, 1888). 112 The Annual American Catalogue 1899 (New York: Office of the Publishers’ weekly, 1900), 50. 113 For a detailed discussion of Cook’s contribution to art criticism in America, see John Peter Simoni, “Art Critics and Criticism in Nineteenth-Century America” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1952), 120–348. Cook was known for his caustic criticism of American art, especially art that betrayed foreign influences, and more often than not he chose biting criticism over praise. From the 1850s through the 1890s he had contributed criticism to the New York Daily Tribune and briefly served as its Paris correspondent. He also contributed art criticism to the Atlantic Monthly and Art Amateur and became the longtime editor of the Studio. 114 Painter-Etchings, Engravings and Objects of Art . . . of the Late Clarence Cook (New York: Anderson Art Galleries, 1909). 115 Cook, Art and Artists, 1: 30. 116 Theodore Robinson, “Camille Corot,” in Modern French Masters, ed. John C. Van Dyke (New York: Century Co., 1896), 113. 117 J. E. Reed, One Hundred Crowned Masterpieces of Modern Painting, 2 vols., vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Gebbie & Co., 1888 [?]), n.p. Reed called Children’s Party, Children’s Festival or Golden Wedding. 118 The Great Modern Painters: English, French, German, etc., Medallists of Successive Universal Expositions (Paris: Goupil & Co., 1884–1886), 108. 119 Louis Viardot, Masterpieces of French Art, ed. William A. Armstrong, 2 vols., vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Gebbie & Co., 1881), 74. 120 Viardot, Masterpieces in French Art, 2: 241. 121 Carroll D. Wright, “The Practical Value of Art,” Munsey’s Magazine 17 (April– September 1897): 563. 122 Wright, “The Practical Value of Art,” 563. 123 Clarence Cook, “Preface,” in Catalogue of the Berlin Photographic Company (New York: Berlin Photographic Company, 1894), iv–v. 124 “House Decoration: Modern Advantages for Making Homes Beautiful,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 24, 1886, 11. 125 Saul E. Zalesch, “What the Four Million Bought: Cheap Oil Paintings of the 1880s,” American Quarterly 48, no. 1 (March 1996): 80–6. 126 On one trip to a flea market, I purchased a Fabiola reproduction. See Francis Alÿs’s Fabiola Project, 1992–present. 127 “The Picture of Commerce,” Harper’s Weekly 33 (May 18, 1889): 403. 128 Herbert B. Adams, Public Libraries and Popular Education (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1900), 172–82.

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Chapter 6 “Albert Spencer’s Pictures,” New York Times, February 18, 1888, 4. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital (1986),” in Education: Culture, Economy and Society, ed. A. H. Halsey et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 50–1. 3 James Jackson Jarves, “Museums of Art, Artists, and Amateurs in America,” Galaxy 10, no. 1 (July 1870): 50–9. See also Jarves’ Italian Rambles: Studies of Life and Manners in New and Old Italy (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1883), 363. Jarves sold his collection of early Italian paintings to Yale University in 1871. 4 Charter of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Laws ­Relating to It: Constitution, by-Laws, Lease (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, [1900]), n.p. 5 Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 16. 6 See Leanne Zalewski, “‘A Public-Spirited Merchant’: Samuel P. Avery, Art Dealer, Advisor, Philanthropist,” in Dealing Art on Both Sides of the Atlantic, 1860–1940, ed. Lynn Catterson (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2017), 92–113. 7 Winifred E. Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1913; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1974), 99–102; Calvin Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1989), 28–32. 8 The early records of the Union League Club burned in a fire, so the minutes for those meetings are lost. I thank Steele Hearn for confirming this information. 9 Other founders included Church, and Blodgett. See Charter of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Laws Relating to It: Constitution, by-Laws, Lease, [4]. 10 Union League Club, A Metropolitan Art-Museum in the City of New York (New York: Printed for the Committee, 1869); Benson John Lossing, History of New York City, Embracing an Outline Sketch of Events from 1609 to 1830, and a Full Account of Its Development from 1830 to 1884 (New York: G. E. Perine, 1884), 835; Nathaniel Burt, Palaces for the People: A Social History of the American Art Museum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977), 86–94. 11 Metropolitan Museum of Art, Annual Report of the Trustees of the Association, Vol. 1, Reports 1–20 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1870/1871–1899), 16–17, 132–6. 12 Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces, 35–6. 13 New Pictures at Avery’s Art Galleries (New York: n. p., 1879), 4. 14 Letter dated July 31, 1872, from Samuel P. Avery to John Taylor Johnston, reprinted in Madeleine Fidell-Beaufort and Jeanne K. Welcher, “Some Views of Art Buying in New York in the 1870s and 1880s,” Oxford Art Journal 5, no. 1 (1982): 53–5. See also Zalewski, “A Public-Spirited Merchant”, 101. 1 2

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15 “A Wondrous Art Sale,” The Sun, March 7, 1886, 1. 16 See John Ott, “Metropolitan, Inc.: Public Subsidy and Private Gain at the Genesis of the American Art Museum,” in New York: Art and Cultural Capital of the Gilded Age, ed. Margaret R. Laster and Chelsea Bruner (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), 122–3. 17 The Collection of Paintings, Drawings and Statuary, the Property of John Taylor Johnston, Esq. (New York: Somerville Art Gallery, 1876). 18 Metropolitan Museum of Art, Annual Report, 178. I thank James Moske for locating this quotation. 19 “The New Museum,” World, March 30, 1880, 1. 20 “The New Museum,” Evening Post, March 29, 1880, 4. Loop’s Oenone (1879) is in the collection of the University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ. 21 “The Metropolitan Museum,” New York Times, May 3, 1882, 8. Phaedra was mistakenly titled The Awakening in the article. Levi Leiter, of the firm Field, Leiter & Co. in Chicago lent the picture. Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc was purchased for Erwin Davis through American artist, J. Alden Weir; see “Meissonier and Bonnat,” New York Times, September 1, 1880, 5. 22 See, for example Montezuma [Montague Marks], “My Note Book,” Art Amateur 9, no. 5 (October 1883): 91. 23 Samuel P. Avery, “Some Notes on the History of Fine Arts in New York City During the Past Fifty Years [1883],” in History of New York City, Embracing an Outline Sketch of Events from 1609 to 1830, and a Full Account of Its Development from 1830 to 1884, ed. Benson John Lossing (New York: Perine Company, 1884), 843. 24 Metropolitan Museum of Art, Annual Reports of the Trustees of the Association, from 1871 to 1902 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1902), 327. 25 The William H. Vanderbilt Collection of Distinguished Barbizon and Genre Paintings . . . Sold by Order of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt (New York: Parke-Bernet Galleries, Inc., 1945). George W. Vanderbilt, in turn left the collection to his nephew Brigadier General Cornelius Vanderbilt (1873–1942), the great-grandson of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, founder of the Vanderbilt fortune. His wife dispersed it at auction in 1945. 26 Andrew Carnegie, “The Best Fields for Philanthropy” North American Review (December 1889) reprinted in Andrew Carnegie, The “Gospel of Wealth” Essays and Other Writings, ed. David Nasaw (New York: Penguin, 2006), 23. 27 Montezuma [Montague Marks], “My Note Book,” Art Amateur 14, no. 3 (February 1886): 55. 28 See Anne Higonnet, A Museum of One’s Own: Private Collecting, Public Gift (New York: Prestel, 2009). For a comparable contemporary collection, see John C. Eastberg and Eric Vogel, eds., Layton’s Legacy: A Historic American Art Collection, 1888–2013 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013).

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29 Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 4, 49, 57. For the Sunday opening controversy, see Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 236–47. 30 Ott, “Metropolitan, Inc,” 124. His account discounts any truly altruistic motives on the part of the founders and trustees. 31 “Who Own Our Museums?” Art Amateur 1, no. 5 (October 1879): 90. 32 Wolfe pledged $2,500, which was a sizeable amount considering that only three people, Johnston, Blodgett, and Stewart, gave $5,000 or more. 33 Evert A. (Evert Augustus) Duyckinck, “A Memorial of John David Wolfe: Read before the New York Historical Society, June 4, 1872” (New York: The Society, 1872). 34 Rebecca A. Rabinow, “Catharine Lorillard Wolfe: The First Woman Benefactor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Apollo 147, no. 433 (March 1998): 51. See also Margaret Laster, “From Private to Public: Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Bequest of 1887,” in “What’s Mine Is Yours”: Private Collectors and Public Patronage in the United States. Essays in Honor of Inge Reist, ed. Esmée Quodbach (New York: The Frick Art Reference Library; Center for Spain in America; Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2021), 182–205. 35 Walter Rowlands, “The Miss Wolfe Collection,” Art Journal (London) 44, no. 3 (January 1889): 12. Her will is reprinted in Metropolitan Museum of Art, Annual Reports, 383. 36 For a discussion of philanthropic expectations from women, see Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 144–7. See also Dianne Sachko Macleod, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800–1940 (University of California Press, 2008), 61–71. 37 “Catharine Lorillard Wolfe; Etched by Robert Blum,” Studio n.s., 2, no. 12 (June 1887); “Miss Wolfe’s Grand Gift,” New York Times, April 8, 1887, 1. 38 “The Metropolitan Museum,” New York Times, December 18, 1888, 5. See also William Reed Huntington, Religious Use of Wealth: A Sermon Commemorative of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, Preached in Grace Church, New York, Easter-Day, April 10th, 1887 (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1887). 39 Catharine Lorillard Wolfe will dated February 14, 1884. Section six outlines her bequest: n.p. [7]; New York City Surrogate Court. I thank Suzan Tell for sending me a copy of the original handwritten will. “The Metropolitan Museum,” New York Times, December 18, 1888, 5. 40 Cicero, “Private Galleries: Collection of Miss Catharine L. Wolfe,” Art Amateur 2, no. 4 (March 1880): 75–6. Some of the wording in this article is very similar to that in Edward Strahan [Earl Shinn], Art Treasures of America, 3 vols., vol. 1 (Philadelphia: George Barrie, 1879–1882), 119–20.

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41 “Miss Wolfe’s Grand Gift,” 1. 42 Rowlands, “The Miss Wolfe Collection,” 15. 43 “Miss Wolfe’s Bequest,” New York Times, April 9, 1887, 4. Although the museum charged admission, there were free nights. 44 Letter undated [Monday p. m., April 1887?] from Samuel P. Avery to Luigi Palma di Cesnola, Wolfe, Catharine L. –Coll. Corres. April–July 1887, Office of the Secretary Correspondence Files, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives (hereafter OSCF, MMA Archives). Her will is reprinted in Metropolitan Museum of Art, Annual Reports of the Trustees of the Association, from 1871 to 1902 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1902), 383, and MMA, Eighteenth Annual Report, 1888, 12. For more on Wolfe, see Margaret Laster, “Catharine Lorillard Wolfe: Collecting and Patronage in the Gilded Age” (PhD, Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2013); Rabinow, “Catharine Lorillard Wolfe,” 48–55; Zalewski, “The Golden Age of French Academic Painting in America, 1867–1893.” PhD diss., City University of New York, 2009, 174–81. 45 Letter undated [Monday p. m., April 1887?] from Samuel P. Avery to Luigi Palma di Cesnola, Wolfe, Catharine L. –Coll. Corres. April–July 1887, OSCF, MMA Archives. See Zalewski, “Public-Spirited Merchant,” 100–10. 46 Huntington’s copy of her portrait now hangs in Grace Church, New York City, where she worshiped. 47 Letter from John Wolfe to unnamed correspondent, n.d., “Wolfe, Catharine L. –Collection, Bonnat’s Roman Girl, 1887-88, 1893, 1931,” OSCF, MMA Archives. 48 Letter dated September 8 [1887] from Samuel P. Avery to Luigi Palma di Cesnola, Wolfe, Catharine L. –Coll. Corres. August 1887, January 1888, 1998, OSCF, MMA Archives. 49 Letter dated August 11, 1887, from Luigi Palma di Cesnola to Daniel Huntington, Wolfe, Catharine L. –Coll. Corres. August. 1887, January 1888, 1998, OSCF, MMA Archives. 50 Letter dated August 26, 1887, from Samuel P. Avery to Luigi Palma di Cesnola, Wolfe, Catharine Lorillard 1871, 1880, 1882, 1919, 1924, 1929, OSCF, MMA Archives. 51 Official receipt dated October 18, 1887, signed by Luigi Palma di Cesnola for Wolfe pictures to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with quotation from section 6 of Wolfe’s will, Wolfe, Catharine L. –Coll. Agreement, Receipt & Lists 1885-87, 1890–92, 1907, 1929–30, 1942, OSCF, MMA Archives. 52 See Letter dated January 23, 1888, from W. C. Prime to Mr. [Cornelius] Vanderbilt, Wolfe, Catharine L. –Collection Bonnat’s Roman Girl 1887–88, 1893, 1931, OSCF, MMA Archives. The Bonnat picture issue continued beyond the opening reception. See also Laster, “Catharine Lorillard Wolfe,” 63–5. Letter undated [1887] from

Notes

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Samuel P. Avery to Luigi Palma di Cesnola, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection – Corres. April–July 1887, OSCF, MMA Archives; Letter dated October 10 [1887?] from Samuel P. Avery to Luigi Palma di Cesnola, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection – Corres. 1871, 1880, 1882, 1919, 1924, 1929, OSCF, MMA Archives. 53 “Art Notes,” Art Review 2, no. 1–3 (September–November 1887): 49; “The ReOpening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Studio 4, no. 1 (December 1888): 9; Metropolitan Museum of Art, Part I. The Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection; Part II. Pictures by Old Masters, in the East Galleries (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1887). See also Rabinow, “Catharine Lorillard Wolfe,” 53. Although the catalog is not signed by Avery, it is most likely written by him; Rebecca Rabinow to author, e-mail, April 23, 2008. 54 “The Re-Opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Studio 4, no. 1 (December 1888): 9. 55 One critic disappointed by the Wolfe collection was Mrs. Schuyler van Rensselaer, “The Wolfe Collection at the Metropolitan Museum,” Independent 39, no. 2033 (1887): 6. 56 Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 212. 57 Ripley Hitchcock, “Public Education in Art,” Christian Union 35, no. 22 (1887): 7. 58 Charter of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Laws Relating to It: Constitution, by-Laws, Lease. 59 “Pictures from the Collection,” 187; “The Metropolitan Museum of Art,” 7. 60 Cicero, “Private Galleries,” 76. 61 “Fine Arts: Recent Gifts,” 193; Cook, Art and Artists, 1: 88. 62 “The Wolfe Collection,” New York Times, November 3, 1887, 8. 63 “Charity Losing a Helper,” New York Times, April 5, 1887, 8. Cabanel’s Shulamite was listed in the article as Turkish Dancing Girl and Meissonier’s General and His Aide-de-Camp was listed as Horsemen. 64 “Pictures from the Collection of the Late Catharine Lorillard Wolfe,” Studio n.s., 2, no. 2 (May 1887): 188. 65 Jenny June, “The Fashions: A Monthly Resume of Practical Matters Relating to Dress and Social Events,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 116, no. 691 (January 1888): 54. ­66 “Heaping Gifts on Gifts,” New York Times, April 9, 1887, 1; Rowlands, “The Miss Wolfe Collection,” 14. 67 Strahan, Art Treasures, 1: 120. See also Leanne Zalewski, “Alexandre Cabanel’s Portraits of the American ‘Aristocracy’ of the Early Gilded Age,” NineteenthCentury Art Worldwide 4, no. 1 (Spring 2005), http://www.19thc-artworldwide. org/index.php/spring05/300–alexandre-cabanels-portraits-of-the-americanaristocracy-of-the-early-gilded-age (accessed July 14, 2022). 68 E. K., “Art Chat: The Wolfe Collection,” The Theatre 3, no. 17 (1887): 340.

190

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69 Clarence Cook, Art and Artists of Our Time, 3 vols., vol. 1 (New York: Selmar Hess, 1888), 71. 70 “The Wolfe Pictures,” 4. 71 At the time this painting was called Two van de Veldes, with William Van de Velde (seated) and Adrien Van de Velde (standing). See Eric M. Zafran, Cavaliers and Cardinals: Nineteenth-Century French Anectodal Paintings (Cincinnati: Taft Museum, 1992), 66; Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, French Realism and the Dutch Masters: The Influence of Dutch Seventeenth-Century Painting on the Development of French Painting between 1830 and 1870 (Utrecht: Haentjens Dekker & Gumbert, 1974), 36. This painting, among others from Wolfe’s collection, were deaccessioned in 1956. See Sotheby Parke Bernet Inc., XIX Century Paintings Including Genre Subjects and Works of the Barbizon School Together with XVI–XVIII Century Dutch, Flemish & Other Old Masters, Part Two (New York: Parke-Bernet Galleries, 1956). 72 “Fine Arts: Recent Gifts,” 193; “The Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Art Amateur 18, no. 1 (December 1887): 7. “Pictures from the Collection of the Late Catharine Lorillard Wolfe,” 187; and “The Wolfe Pictures,” 4. 73 “Pictures from the Collection of the Late Catharine Lorillard Wolfe,” 187. Two Van de Veldes was formerly in the Laurent-Richard collection in Paris, whose sale took place in 1878. 74 Ibid. 75 Cook, Art and Artists, 1: 71. Cook noted that engravings after Two Van de Veldes are sometimes called The Critic. He repeated his assessment of Meissonier in Clarence Cook, “The Art Year,” Chautauquan 8, no. 7 (April 1888): 416. 76 “Fine Arts: Recent Gifts,” 193. This writer noted that Two Van de Veldes, brought to New York by dealer William Schaus, was sold to Wolfe so quickly that the public had not seen it. See also “Pictures from the Collection of the Late Catharine Lorillard Wolfe,” 187. 77 E. K., “Art Chat: The Wolfe Collection,” 339. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid. 80 Strahan, Art Treasures, 1: 125. 81 Arthur Hoeber, “American Appreciation of German Art,” American-German Review 1, no. 1 (1898): 52. 82 For a history of the picture, as well as the watercolor of it, which Meissonier was working on in 1887, see Constance Cain Hungerford, “1807, Friedland,” in Ernest Meissonier rétrospective (Lyon: Musée des beaux-arts, 1993), 220–35. See also “Meissonier Talks About Himself,” New York Times, February 13, 1887, 2. 83 “For the People to Enjoy: Rosa Bonheur’s Great Work in the Art Museum,” New York Times, March 27, 1887, 9.

Notes

191

84 “Another Princely Gift: Meissonier’s Masterpiece Now the City’s,” New York Times, May 3, 1887, 1. 85 Metropolitan Museum of Art, Annual Reports . . . 1871–1902, 381. See also Hungerford, “1807, Friedland,” 220–5; ibid. 86 “Further Gifts to the Metropolitan Museum,” Critic, no. 175 (May 7, 1887): 232; “What Cost the Most,” New York Times, May 21, 1888, 2. 87 Mrs. Schuyler van Rensselaer, “Fine Arts: The Metropolitan Museum,” Independent, no. 39 (May 12, 1887): 6. 88 “The Art World,” New York Times, December 23, 1871, 2. 89 Ibid. 90 Henry James, Parisian Sketches: Letters to the New York Tribune 1875–1876, ed. Leon Edel and Ilse Dusoir Lind (New York: New York University Press, 1957), 33–39. James called 1807, Friedland “The Charge of the Cavalry” in this article. At the time, the painting was purchased for 200,000 francs by Sir Richard Wallace, but instead sold to A. T. Stewart. 91 Ibid., 38. ­92 Edward Strahan [Earl Shinn], The Chefs-d’œuvre d’art of the International Exhibition, 1878 (Philadelphia: Gebbie & Barrie, 1878–1880), 13. 93 Strahan Art Treasures, 1: 28. 94 Ibid., 1: 30. 95 Ibid. 96 Seney donated several French academic, European, and American paintings, and; see “George I. Seney’s Gifts,” New York Times, April 7, 1887, 8; “The New Pictures at the Metropolitan Museum,” Harper’s Weekly 31, no. 1586 (May 14, 1887): 350. 97 Mrs. Schuyler van Rensselaer, “The Opening of the Art Season,” Independent 38, no. 198 (November 25, 1886): 7. 98 Luther Hamilton, “The Work of the Paris Impressionists in New York,” Cosmopolitan 1, no. 4 (1886): 240. 99 Seney also donated George Inness’ Autumn Oaks, two paintings by Josef Israëls, two by Anton Mauve, and one each by Julien Dupré, Carl Marr, Francis D. Millet, A. H. Wyant, V. Baixeras, and C. H. Davis. 100 “George I. Seney’s Gifts,” New York Times, April 7, 1887, 8. 101 See ibid.; “The New Pictures at the Metropolitan Museum,” 350. 102 Letter to Henry Gurdon Marquand from Samuel P. Avery, n.d. [1894], Wolfe, John, 1893–94, 1934, 1994, OSCF, MMA Archives. 103 See Letter to Samuel P. Avery from Erwin Davis, March 21, 1889, https://www. metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436948 accessed July 9, 2019. 104 Letter to Luigi Palma di Cesnola [?] from Samuel P. Avery, n. d. “Wolfe, Catharine Lorillard Collection—Policy as to additions, 1893-94, W8325,” OSCF, MMA Archives.

192

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105 Letter to Luigi Palma di Cesnola [?] from Samuel P. Avery, 5 January [1893 or 1894]. “Wolfe, Catharine Lorillard Collection—Policy as to additions, 1893-94, W8325,” OSCF, MMA Archives. Wolfe did actually own a significant American painting, Winslow Homer’s Life Line (now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art), which she had purchased in 1884 for $2,500, but did not include it in her bequest. 106 Laura L. Meixner, “Jean-François Millet’s Angelus in America,” American Art Journal 12, no. 4 (Autumn 1980): 79. 107 Alfred Trumble, The Painter of ‘the Angelus’ a Study of the Life, Labors, and Vicissitudes of Jean François Millet, 2nd ed. (New York: American Art Association, 1889). 108 Benjamin Constant, “Two Masters at the Barye Exhibition,” New York Times, December 2, 1889, 4. 109 Meixner, “Jean-François Millet’s Angelus in America,” 78–84. 110 Ibid. 111 Leanne Zalewski, “Art for the Public: William Henry Vanderbilt’s Cultural Legacy,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 11, no. 2 (Summer 2012), http://www.19thcartworldwide.org/summer12/leanne-zalewski-william-henry-vanderbilts-culturallegacy (accessed November 30, 2014). See also Zalewski, “A Public-Spirited Merchant,” 103–10. 112 Catalogue of the W.H. Vanderbilt Collection of Paintings (New York: De Vinne Press, 1886). Yale University Library has a copy noting which paintings were at the museum and which ones remained at 640 Fifth Avenue. 113 Letter dated April 1, 1902, from Luigi Palma di Cesnola to George W. Vanderbilt, “Vanderbilt, William H. –Loan Collection Lent by Geo. W. Vanderbilt 1902–03, 1905–09, 1911–12,” OSCF, MMA Archives; typed transcription also in “Avery, Samuel P. 1901–03, 1914, 1921, 1928, 1937–38, 2001, 2004, 2012,” OSCF, MMA Archives; Editorials and Resolutions in Memory of Samuel Putnam Avery (New York: Privately Printed, 1905), 4. 114 Editorials and Resolutions, 55, 67, 77. Authors include the New York Evening Post, 55; Russell Sturgis, 67; and J. P. Morgan, 77. 115 The William H. Vanderbilt Collection of Distinguished Barbizon and Genre Paintings . . . Sold by Order of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt. 116 Shelley Bennett, Art of Wealth: The Huntingtons in the Gilded Age (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library Press, 2013), 31. 117 “Will of Collis P. Huntington Annexed to Petition” [. . .] SECOND, CP Huntington WILL Case on Appeal 1900-1958, p. 29, HEH 24/4, Henry E. Huntington Papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. See also Bennett, Art of Wealth, 31. 118 See Bennett, Art of Wealth, 27–9.

Notes

193

119 “Three Masterpieces,” New York Sun, May 27, 1925. From Huntington Biographical File, folder, HEH 16/10, Henry E. Huntington Papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. 120 Jenny June, “The Fashions: A Monthly Resume of Practical Matters Relating to Dress and Social Events.” Godey’s Lady’s Book 116, no. 691 (January 1888): 55; “The Metropolitan Museum,” 5. 121 Metropolitan Museum of Art, Annual Reports of the Trustees of the Association, from 1871 to 1902, 10, 174. Metropolitan Museum of Art Trustee Joseph Choate, quoted in Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 196. 122 “American Public Spirit,” New York Times, May 4, 1887, 4. 123 “Miss Wolfe’s Grand Gift,” 1. 124 Andrew Carnegie, The “Gospel of Wealth” Essays and Other Writings, ed. David Nasaw (New York: Penguin, 2006), 23. 125 Champion Bissell, “Modern Pictures and the New York Market,” Belford’s Monthly and Democratic Review 8, no. 45 (1892): 678. 126 Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 2000), 127, 129.

Chapter 7 1 2 3

­4

5

“France at the World’s Fair,” New York Times, July 9, 1893, 15. See W. C. Brownell, French Art: Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1892), which echoes this trend. For the Centennial Exhibition, see Kimberly Orcutt, Power & Posterity: American Art at Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibition (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017). George Pangolo, “The Story of Some Old Friends” Cosmopolitan 23 (1897): 286. I thank Heather Ward for this reference. Fahreda Mahzar or one of the other Street in Cairo dancers was identified as “Little Egypt.” Mahzar was called the first MENAHT (Middle Eastern, North African, Hellenic, Turkish) dancer in the United States. Not all of the MENAHT dancers were Egyptian. See also István Ormos, Cairo in Chicago: Cairo Street at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 (Paris: Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 2021). Carolyn Kinder Carr, “Prejudice and Pride: Presenting American Art at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition,” in Revisiting the White City: American Art at the 1893 World’s Fair (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1993), 68.

194

Notes

Carolyn Kinder Carr, Sara Tyson Hallowell: Pioneer Curator and Art Advisor in the Gilded Age (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2019), 161–81. 7 “The Fine Arts: Art Notes,” Critic 21, no. 620 (January 6, 1894): 12. 8 Carr, “Prejudice and Pride,” 108–13. Some medal winners included Edwin Austin Abbey, Frank Weston Benson, Edwin Howland Blashfield, George de Forest Brush, Kenyon Cox, Frank Duveneck, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, George Inness, Eastman Johnson, John Singer Sargent, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. 9 Halsey Cooley Ives and Moses P. Handy, World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893: Official Catalogue. Part X. Department K: Fine Arts (Chicago: W. B. Conkey Co., 1893), 61. 10 John C. Van Dyke, “Painting at the Fair,” Century Illustrated Magazine 48, no. 3 (July 1894): 440. 11 Letter dated 1885 from Samuel P. Avery to Luigi Palma di Cesnola, Paintings & Sculpture Committee on 1882–85, 1887, Office of the Secretary Subject Files, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives, hereafter MMA Archives. 12 Hans Huth argued that the 1886 show was a decisive event in the introduction of French Impressionist art in the United States; see Hans Huth, “Impressionism Comes to America,” Gazette des beaux-arts 29 (April 1946): 225–56. 13 Theodore Child, “A Note on Impressionist Painting,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 74, no. 440 (January 1887): 315. 14 Ibid., 313. 15 Catalog of the Albert Spencer Collection of Foreign Paintings (New York: Fifth Avenue Art Galleries, 1888). For Mary Cassatt’s role in bringing Impressionism to the United States, see Laura D. Corey, “The Many Hats of Mary Cassatt: Artist, Advisor, Broker, Tastemaker,” in Dealing Art on Both Sides of the Atlantic, 1860– 1940, ed. Lynn Catterson (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 39–57. 16 Ives and Handy, World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893, 63. Lenders’ names were listed after the title of each artwork. 17 William Walton, World’s Columbian Exposition: The Art and Architecture, 2 vols., vol. 1 (Philadelphia: George Barrie, 1893), 28. 18 Ibid., 1: 27–8. 19 William A. Coffin, “The Columbian Exposition I,” Nation 57, no. 1466 (August 3, 1893): 80; Lucy Monroe, “Chicago Letter,” Critic 19, no. 587 (May 20, 1893): 329; “Schools of Art Show Their Best,” New York Herald, May 7, 1893, 18; Van Dyke, “Painting at the Fair,” 440. 20 “France at the World’s Fair,” 15. 21 Van Dyke, “Painting at the Fair,” 440. 22 Ibid. 6

Notes

195

23 J. C. V. D. [John C. Van Dyke], “Art at the Fair: Italian, Spanish, and French Painting,” New York Evening Post, August 8, 1893, 5. 24 “Schools of Art Show Their Best,” 18. 25 William A. Coffin, “The Columbian Exposition V,” Nation 57, no. 1470 (August 31, 1893): 150–1. Coffin spent three years in Paris in Léon Bonnat’s atelier and exhibited in the Paris Salons of 1879, 1880, and 1882. 26 The decline of the traditional Salon is the subject of Patricia Mainardi, End of the Salon: Art and the State in the Early Third Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 27 In 1890, the long-standing and powerful official Paris Salon split into two factions: the Société des artistes français and the Société nationale des beaux-arts. Bouguereau became president of the Société des artistes français, and Cabanel and Bouguereau had often served as jurors and Gérôme and Meissonier occasionally served as jurors in the old Salon. Meissonier became the first president of the Société nationale des beaux-arts. Some of its founding members included DagnanBouveret, Puvis de Chavannes, Henri Gervex, Albert Besnard, and Carolus-Duran. See Constance Cain Hungerford, “Meissonier and the Founding of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts,” Art Journal 48, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 71–7. This split, widely reported in the American press, affected American artists wishing to exhibit at the Paris Salon. See, for example, Georges Lafenestre, “The Salons of Paris,” Chautauquan 11, no. 5 (August 1890): 591–5; Susan Hayes Ward, “Fine Arts: The Two Salons,” Independent 42, no. 2156 (March 27, 1890): 7–8; Clarence Wason, “The ‘Meissonier’ Salon,” Art Amateur 23, no. 2 (July 1890): 23–4. 28 Coffin, “The Columbian Exposition V,” 151. 29 “France at the World’s Fair,” 15. 30 Sophia Antoinette Walker, “Fine Arts: French Lights on American Pictures at Chicago,” Independent 45, no. 2333 (August 17, 1893): 7. 31 Ibid. 32 “French Painting,” Art Amateur 29, no. 6 (November 1893): 138; Montague Marks, “My Note Book,” Art Amateur 29, no. 6 (November 1893): 132. The Art Amateur was the only art journal to win a medal at the World’s Columbian Exposition. 33 Famous Paintings of the World: A Collection of Photographic Reproductions of Great Modern Masterpieces (New York: Fine Art Publishing Co., 1894), 239; Lucy Monroe, “Chicago Letter,” Critic 19, no. 590 (June 10, 1893): 391. See also René Ménard, “W. Bouguereau,” in Great Modern Painters (Paris: Goupil & Co., 1884), 1: 12. 34 Meissonier had created these sculptures as models to assist him with his painting, not as works unto themselves, but they were exhibited regardless of their initial function; see Walton, World’s Columbian Exposition, 1: 36–7.

196

Notes

35 Willis John Abbot, “Art at the World’s Fair,” Christian Union 47, no. 17 (April 29, 1893): 808; Carr, “Prejudice and Pride,” 65–6, 71. See M. Knoedler & Co. records, Sales Painting Book 6, December 1885–June 1892, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA. 36 Lucy Monroe, “Chicago Letter,” Critic 20, no. 594 (July 8, 1893): 30. 37 “Chicago Letter,” Critic 19, no. 587 (May 20, 1893): 329. 38 Letter from Sara T. Hallowell to Henry G. Marquand, December 5, 1892, “Loans Requested—refused, World’s Columbian Expos. 1892–93,” Office of the Secretary Correspondence Files, MMA Archives. For more on Hallowell, see Carr, Sara Tyson Hallowell: Pioneer Curator and Art Advisor in the Gilded Age; Kristen M. Jensen, “Her Sex Was an Insuperable Objection: Sara Tyson Hallowell and the Art Institute of Chicago 1873–1914,” M. A. thesis, Southern Connecticut State University, 2000. 39 Walker, “Fine Arts,” 7. 40 Monroe, “Chicago Letter.”Critic 20, no. 594 (July 8, 1893): 30. 41 Coffin, “The Columbian Exposition V,” 151; and E. S. C., “Art at Chicago: Impressions of an Art Student at the World’s Fair,” New York Times, June 23, 1893, 9. 42 E. S. C., “Art at Chicago,” 23; Lucy Monroe, “Chicago Letter,” Critic 19, no. 590 (June 10, 1893): 391; and Monroe, “Chicago Letter,” Critic 19, no. 588 (May 27, 1893): 351. 43 Lucy Monroe, “Chicago Letter,” Critic 20, no. 597 (July 29, 1893): 76. 44 Roger Riordan, “The World’s Fair Loan Collection: Contemporary Painting,” Art Amateur 30, no. 5 (April 1894): 130. 45 “The World’s Fair Loan Collection: Naturalism, the Barbizon School, Corot,” Art Amateur 30, no. 3 (February 1894): 76. 46 Coffin, “The Columbian Exposition V,” 150; and Lucy Monroe, “Chicago Letter,” Critic 20, no. 597 (July 29, 1893): 76. 47 Walker, “Fine Arts,” 7. 48 Coffin, “The Columbian Exposition V,” 152; J. C. V. D. [John C. Van Dyke], “Art at the Fair: The American Pictures,” New York Evening Post, July 31, 1893, 5; “Loan Exhibition at the Fair,” New York Herald, May 7, 1893, 152. 49 Lucy Monroe, “Chicago Letter,” Critic 20, no. 597 (July 29, 1893): 76. Monroe mistakenly attributed Manet’s Dead Toreador to Monet. ­50 Ibid. See also Walker, “Fine Arts,” 7. 51 Lucy Monroe, “Chicago Letter,” Critic 20, no. 597 (July 29, 1893): 76. 52 Walker, “Fine Arts,” 7. 53 Lucy Monroe, “Chicago Letter,” Critic 20, no. 597 (July 29, 1893): 76.

Notes

197

54 Ibid. Pourville in the Morning, Misty Weather was called Morning Fog in the catalog; see Ives and Handy, World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893, 63, no. 2954. 55 Riordan, “The World’s Fair Loan Collection,” 130. 56 W. H. W., “What Is Impressionism?,” Art Amateur 28, no. 1 (December 1892): 5. 57 Theodore Child, “Some Modern French Painters,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 80, no. 480 (May 1890): 838. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Frances Weitzenhoffer, The Havemeyers: Impressionism Comes to America (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), 82–95. 61 Mishoe Brennecke showed that the rise in acceptance of works by Manet was replaced by interest in Monet by the early 1890s. See Nancy Mishoe Brennecke, “‘The Painter in Chief of Ugliness’: Edouard Manet and Nineteenth-Century America” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2001), 266. 62 John Charles Van Dyke, ed., Modern French Masters (New York: De Vinne Press, 1896; reprint, New York: Garland, 1976), 119–30, 239–50. 63 Coffin, “The Columbian Exposition V,” 152. 64 Emma Bullet, “Followed No Master: Monet, the French Painter, Now in Favor in America,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 24, 1893, 8. 65 “Art Notes,” New York Times, January 23, 1893, 4. 66 Bullet, “Followed No Master,” 8. 67 Ibid. 68 “The Knoedler Sale,” Collector 4, no. 12 (April 15, 1893): 188–9. 69 “The Seney Sale,” Collector 5, no. 8 (February 15, 1894): 125. ­70 Goupil & Cie / Boussod, Valadon & Co. Stock Books, book 14: 31, 148, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA. 71 William A. Coffin, “The Columbian Exposition II,” Nation 57, no. 1467 (August 10, 1893): 96–7. 72 The Painter’s Eye, Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts by Henry James, ed. John L. Sweeney (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 216. 73 Theodore Child, “American Artists at the Paris Exhibition,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 79, no. 472 (September 1889): 489. 74 Alfred Stevens, Impressions on Painting, trans. Charlotte Adams (New York: George J. Coombes, 1886), v. 75 Van Dyke, “Painting at the Fair,” 439. 76 Lucy Monroe, “Chicago Letter,” Critic 19, no. 588 (May 27, 1893): 351. 77 Ibid. 78 Van Dyke, “Painting at the Fair,” 439.

198

Notes

Louis Viardot, Masterpieces of French Art, ed. William A. Armstrong, 2 vols., vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Gebbie & Co., 1881), 1: 1. 80 Ripley Hitchcock, Art of the World, 2 vols., vol. 1 (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1894), vi. 81 N. N., “French Art Jealousy,” New York Evening Post, July 29, 1893, 11. 82 For an assessment of the American fine arts at the World’s Columbian Exposition, see Carr, “Prejudice and Pride,” 62–123. 83 Coffin, “The Columbian Exposition II,” 97. 84 Ibid. 85 Sarah Burns, “The Country Boy Goes to the City: Thomas Hovenden’s Breaking Home Ties in American Popular Culture,” American Art Journal 20, no. 4 (1988), 59–73. 86 Lucy Monroe, “Chicago Letter,” Critic 20, no. 598 (August 5, 1893): 92. 87 Coffin, “The Columbian Exposition II,” 97. 88 William A. Coffin, “The Columbian Exposition III,” Nation 57, no. 1468 (August 17, 1893): 115; Lucy Monroe, “Chicago Letter,” Critic 20, no. 598 (August 5, 1893): 92; and Van Dyke, ­“Painting at the Fair,” 446. 89 Coffin, “The Columbian Exposition III,” 115. 90 Walker, “Fine Arts,” 7. 91 Van Dyke, “Painting at the Fair,” 446. 92 Ibid., 444. 93 Ibid., 446. 94 Walton, World’s Columbian Exposition, 1: 27. 95 Hitchcock, Art of the World, 1: 3. 96 Ibid., 2: 195. 97 J. C. V. D., “Art at the Fair: The American Pictures,” 5. 98 Walton, World’s Columbian Exposition, 1: 28; and “The Loan Collection,” Art Amateur 29, no. 2 (July 1893): 36. 99 Hitchcock, Art of the World, 1: 3. 100 Coffin, “The Columbian Exposition I,” 80. 101 “The Loan Collection,” 36. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid., 36–7. 79

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Index Abbey, Edwin Austin (1852–1911) 143 academic art 6, 10, 131, 133–4, 136, 145 European 110, 146 French 6, 23, 43, 136–7, 139, 143, 146 academic finis 6 Académie des beaux-arts 21, 33 Adams, Herbert B. (1850–1901) 54, 170 n.46 African-Americans 51, 52, 88, 148 agrarian pictures 85, 88. See also landscape paintings Albion 96 The Aldine 53, 96, 98 Alighieri Dante (1265–1321) 65 American (journal) 35 American Art Association (auction house) 127, 134, 166 n.3 American committee for 1867 Universal Exposition 13–15, 154 n.10 American Museum of Natural History 4, 116 American Society of Water-Color Painters, NY 87 animal painters 85–6 antebellum journals 96 Appleton’s Journal 98 Armstrong, William A. (1839–1923?) 143 Art Amateur 38, 40, 48, 70, 74, 96, 115, 117, 195 n.32 art collectors. See also genre paintings; marketing collections; New York collections; specific collectors Catholic 75 connoisseurship 99 contributions 7–14, 18–23, 89 immoral subject 80–4 Jewish 75 journals and newspapers for marketing collections 96–100 loan exhibitions 91–5 loans to Paris Salon 99–100 names of 9 negative press 100, 118, 120–3

Protestant 75, 78 religious pictures 75 role 3–4 women 54, 75–7, 83, 86–7, 89, 148 art dealers 1–5. See also specific dealers American buyers and 45–6 ­contributions 7–8, 23–31, 36 (see also specific dealers) loans 90 relationship with the Metropolitan Museum of Art 130–2 art history surveys 103–6, 148 Arthur, Chester (1829–1886) 52 Artistic Houses 98 artists, academic painters awards and honors 33–4 sale prices 32, 34–5 works by 31 Artists of the Nineteenth Century and Their Works (book) 103–4 Art Journal 38, 96 art market 3, 35, 45–6, 92. See also international art market assessment of 35–6 dictionary-style books for 103–4, 109 Art Palace 132 art as status markers 4 artwork entries. See dictionary-style books Astor, William B. (1792–1875) 38, 95 ateliers 21, 34 auctions 9, 26. See also Avery, Samuel P.; Belmont, August; Johnston, John Taylor; Morgan, Mary Jane; Seney, George; Stewart, Alexander T.; Wolfe, Catharine Lorillard catalogs 9, 19, 23, 28–30, 37, 88, 100–2, 107, 109, 118, 128 dealers role in 36 French and American paintings sale 36–8, 40–3 sale assessment 35–6 tariff on foreign art 44

228

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Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library 4 Avery, Samuel P. (1822–1904) 14, 59, 91–3, 127, 132, 134, 141 as American Commissioner to the 1867 Universal Exposition 12, 15, 28 art market, assessment of 35–6 catalogs, sale 29–30, 181 n.71 encouraged donations 124 as liaison and dealer 2, 5, 7–8, 10, 26–32, 45, 114–15 pre-exposition sales 30 as printmaker 15 relationship with the Metropolitan Museum of Art 111–18 sale prices 32, 34, 44, 87, 124 Avery, Samuel P., Jr. (1847–1920) 35, 44 Bacon, Henry (1866–1924) 74–5 Ballu, Roger (1852–1908) 137 Barbizon School 2, 84–6, 104, 133–5, 145, 149 n.7 Barye, Antoine-Louis (1796–1875) 159 n.5 Bascom, John (1827–1911) 53, 84 Aesthetics, or the Science of Beauty (book) 53 on landscape paintings 84 Bastien-Lepage, Jules (1848–1884) 130, 139, 141, 186 n.21 Joan of Arc 114, 127, 138 Beckwith, James Carroll (1852–1917) 94 ­belly dance. See Gérôme, Jean-Léon Belmont, August (1813–1890) 1, 26, 28, 35, 38, 46, 54, 59 collections of 8, 9, 47, 49, 55, 75, 86, 96–8, 101–2 exhibiting paintings at National Academy of Design 92 private gallery of 91–4 sale 1872 36, 40, 42, 43 vice-president of the Pedestal Fund Loan Exhibition 94–5 Bénézit Dictionary of Artists 103 Benson, Eugene (1839–1908) 47, 61, 82, 83, 87, 148 articles on European art 47, 96 observation on collections 47, 61, 87 Berlin Photographic Company 107

Berne-Bellecour, Étienne-Prosper (1838–1910) 173 n.95, 173 n.107 Bible 52, 79–80, 88, 137 Bida, Alexandre (1813–1895), Massacre of the Mamelukes 102 Bierstadt, Albert (1830–1902) 14–15, 18 Donner Lake from the Summit 88, 98 Rocky Mountains 15 Bishop, David Wolfe (1834–1901) 117–18 Blashfield, Edwin Howland (1848–1936) 194 n.8 Blodgett, William T. (1832–1875) 12, 14–15, 112, 116 Old Master painting donation to the Metropolitan Museum of Art 113 Boime, Albert (1933–2008) 3 Boldini, Giovanni (1842–1931) 143 Bolin, Anne 3 Bonaparte, Charles Joseph (1851–1921) 172 n.88 Bonaparte, Louis-Napoléon, Emperor Napoleon III (1808–1873) 11, 21, 70–1, 120, 126 Bonaparte, Napoleon, Emperor Napoleon I (1769–1821) 70, 124 Bonheur, Rosa (1822–1899) 35–6, 38, 40, 85–6, 89 Blacksmith 86 in dictionary entry 104 Horse Fair 27, 38, 40, 86, 102, 123–6, 138, 164 n.77 Return from Pasture 36 Sheep by the Sea 21 Weaning the Calves 119 Bonnat, Léon (1833–1922) 137, 139 An Egyptian Peasant Woman and Her Child 119 Roman Girl at a Fountain 118–19 Booth, Edwin (1833–1893) 66 Boughton, George (1833–1905) 29 Bouguereau, William (1825–1905) 2, 6, 22, 28, 31, 45, 57, 133, 137, 162 n.41 Breton Brother and Sister 104–5, 114, 119 Charity 104 First Caresses 26 Fraternal Love 30

Index Going to the Bath 96–7, 128 Happy Mother 30 Holy Family 21 ­Holy Women at the Sepulchre 137 Homer and His Guide 102 Italian Mother and Child 36 Newborn Lamb 102 Our Lady of the Angels 137 Pet Lamb 104 Philomela and Procne 33 Return from the Harvest 58, 102 sale prices 31, 32, 34, 35–6 Triumph of the Martyr 33 Bourdieu, Pierre (1930–2002) 21, 46 Boussod, Valadon, & Co. 134, 142, 153 Breton, Jules (1827–1906) 2, 18, 22, 29, 57 Blessing of the Wheat in Artois 21 Calling in the Gleaners 21 Church Pardon in Brittany 94 Communicants 38, 75 Religious Procession in Brittany 75 sale prices 38 works on peasants life 61 Brimo, René (1911–1948) 4 Brion, Gustave (1824–1877) 18 Brooklyn Daily Eagle 107, 141 Brownell, William Crary (1867–1936) 193 n.2 Cabanel, Alexandre (1823–1889) 2, 6, 7, 28, 31, 45, 80, 104, 130, 133–7, 139, 141, 144, 146 awards and honors 20–2 Birth of Venus 19, 21, 126 Catharine Lorillard Wolfe 63–4 Desdemona 34 in dictionary entry 104 Flora 34 Hebe 34 Nymph Abducted by a Faun 21 Paradise Lost 21 Phaedra 114 Pia de Tolomei 64–6, 128, 171 n.74 Psyche 34 Rachel 34 Rebecca 34 sale prices 32, 34–5

229

Shulamite 76, 78–80, 83, 100, 104, 119–20, 174 n.18 Carnegie, Andrew (1835–1919) 115, 130 “Gospel of Wealth” 115 Carolus-Duran (1837–1917) 139, 143 Carrier-Belleuse, Albert-Ernest (1824–1887) 159 n.5 Cassatt, Alexander (1839–1906) 134 Cassatt, Mary (1844–1926) 134, 141 Catholic Church 77–8 ­Cazin, Jean-Charles (1841–1901) 136, 138, 139, 141 Centennial Exhibition, 1876 93, 102, 131 Centennial Loan Exhibition. See Metropolitan Museum of Art Century Association 13–14, 154 n.11 Cesnola, Louis or Luigi Palma di (1832–1904) 99, 113, 118, 127, 132 Champlin, John Denison (1834–1915), Cyclopedia of Painters and Paintings (book) 103–4, 183 n.106 Chaplin, Charles (1825–1891), Haidee 83 Chartran, Théobald (1846–1907) 139 Chase, William Merritt (1849–1916) 94 Chaucard, Alfred (1821–1909) 128 Chesneau, Ernest (1833–1890) 17–18 Child, Theodore (1846–1892) 70, 134, 141, 147 Chinese people 88, 148 Choate, Joseph (1832–1917) 114 Christian subject matter 52, 75–9, 88 Church, Frederick Edwin (1826–1900) 13–14 Niagara/Niagara Falls 12, 15, 16–18, 37 Circus maximus, Rome. See Gérôme, Jean-Léon Civil War (United States) 1–5, 11, 15, 28, 45, 49–50, 58, 71, 88, 96 Clarke, Purdon (1846–1911) 32 class/class system civic stewardship 7 class formation 4 European genre paintings 54 literary scenes 66 militant working class against bourgeoisie 71 painted subjects and 47, 51, 87–8 social harmony and 49

230

Index

upper-class/lower-class 3, 4, 9, 51–63, 82, 91–2, 108–9, 148 working-class labor 1, 7, 87 Clement, Clara Erskine (later Waters) (1834–1916), Artists of the Nineteenth Century and Their Works (book) 103, 183 n.103 Coffin, William (1924–2006) 136–7, 141, 145 Coliseum. See Gérôme, Jean-Léon collection and auction catalogs 100–2. See also auctions; New York collections Collector (journal) 96, 99, 142 Commune (Paris) 70, 71 Confederate soldiers 51–2 Connoisseur 98 connoisseurship 99 Cook, Clarence (1828–1900) 61, 74, 107, 119–20, 147, 184 n.113 Art and Artists of Our Time (book) 104 Corcoran Gallery of Art 127, 153 n.32 Cordero, José Villegas (1844–1921) 114 Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille (1796–1875) 22, 104, 114, 150 Road near Paris 128 Ville d’Avray 104 ­Cot, Pierre-Auguste (1837–1883), The Storm 119–22 Cottier, New York art dealer 30 Courbet, Gustave (1819–1877) 18, 44, 147 Couture, Thomas (1815–1879) 94, 146 Day Dreaming 94 Realist 128 Soap Bubbles 48, 102 Volunteers of the French Revolution, 1789 128 Cox, Kenyon (1856–1919) 194 n.8 Crayon 19, 27, 92, 96 Cropsey, Jasper (1823–1900) 13–14 Crystal Palace Exhibition (London, New York) 36 cultural capital 1, 4, 10, 46 cultural education 24 cultural inferiority 3, 132 cultural mobility 4 Dagnan-Bouveret, Pascal-Adolphe-Jean (1852–1929) 136, 138, 139, 141 Dannat, William Turner (1853–1929) 143

Daubigny, Charles-François (1817–1878) 2, 22, 44, 133 The End of the Month of May 85 David, Jacques-Louis (1748–1825) 134 Davis, Erwin (c. 1831–1902) 126 Decamps, Alexandre-Gabriel (1803–1860) 35–7, 102 Night Watch in Smyrna 102 Turkish Patrol, Smyrna 37 Degas, Edgar (1834–1917) 136, 139, 141 de Kay Charles (1848–1935) 48 Delacroix, Eugène (1798–1863), MuleyAbd-Err-Rahmann, Sultan of Morocco, with His Officers and Guard of Honor, March, 1832 129 Delaroche, Paul (1797–1856) 14, 26, 29 deluxe catalogs 102 Demidoff, Prince Anatole (1813–1870) 37 de Neuville, Alphonse(1835–1885) 2, 7, 69–71, 87, 133, 146 Le Bourget, The Dispatch-Bearer 71–4, 128 Detaille, Edouard (1848–1912) 2, 7, 69–71, 88 Arrest of the Ambulance Corps in the Eastern Part of France, January, 1871 71–2, 128 Defense of Champigny 126 description of painting 71–3 Diaz de la Peña, Narcisse-Virgile (1808– 1876) 2, 35–6, 114, 133 Holy Family 76 Dickens, Charles (1812–1870) 61 dictionary-style books 103–6, 109 Art and Artists of Our Time 104 Artists of the Nineteenth Century and Their Works 103–4 Bénézit Dictionary of Artists 103 Cyclopedia of Painters and Paintings 103–4 entries in 103–6 Grove Dictionary of Art/Oxford Art Dictionary 104 A History of French Painting 103 Masterpieces of French Art 106 ­masterpieces in US collections 104 Works in the United States, entries of 104

Index Doré, Gustave (1832–1883), La Sainte Bible 75 Dubufe, Edouard (1819–1883), Prodigal Son 98 Ducrot, Auguste-Alexandre (1817–1882), La défense de Paris (1870–1871) 73 Dupré, Jules (1811–1889) 22, 114, 133 Dupré, Julien (1851–1910) 191 n.99 Durand, Asher B. (1796–1886) 14 Durand-Gréville, Émile (1838–1914) 46, 91, 98–9, 101, 115 Durand, John. See Crayon Durand-Ruel, Paul (1831–1922) 134, 141, 142 Düsseldorf Royal Academy of Art 86 Duveen, Joseph (1869–1939) 129 Eakins, Thomas (1844–1916) 194 n.8 École des beaux-arts 6, 34, 143 educational advancement 7, 24, 44, 54, 111, 141–2 Elliott, Charles Loring (1812–1868) 14 Escallier, Eléonore (1827–1888) 86 Eudel, Thomas 38 Faure, Jean-Baptiste (1830–1914) 66 Fink, Lois 26 Flameng, François (1856–1923) 78 Foreign Masterpieces Owned in the United States 10, 130–5, 137–42, 146 Fortuny, Mariano (1838–1874) 6, 36, 98 Founding Fathers 51 Franco-Prussian War 69–73 Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly 124 French arts 1. See also World’s Columbian Exposition American and French critics on 16–18, 52, 70, 83–4 exposition catalog 19–20, 23 landscape painting 84 lenders 21–2 peasant paintings 58 sale prices 9, 26, 31, 36 at Universal Exposition, Paris, 1867 11–12, 18–23, 50, 133 French Impressionist art 10, 133–4, 139, 141, 142

231

Frère, Pierre-Edouard (1819–1886) 2, 7, 9, 19, 31, 57, 133 The Evening Prayer 61–2 founder of “School of Sympathetic Genre” 61 Visit of a Sister of Charity 75 Frick Collection 153 n.52, 182 n.85 Frick, Henry Clay (1849–1919) 101, 105 Friedman, Lawrence (1940-) 4–5 Fromentin, Eugène (1820–1876) 22 Galaxy 53 Gallati, Barbara 6 Gambart, Ernest (1814–1902) 8, 26–31, 38, 124 ­Gardner, Isabella Stewart (1840–1924) Museum 154 n.32 Gautier, Théophile (1811–1872) 17 Gazette des Beaux-Arts 17, 151 n.12, 154 n.9, 159 n.5, 168 n.29, 172 n.85, 181 n.68, 194 n.12 genre paintings bourgeois women images 61–4 as entertainment 54–5 European 54 moral sentiment 54–5 on peasants life 54–61 popularity of 53 religious subjects as 75 sentimentality of 53–5, 59, 61, 87–8 The United States 52–3 work and country life 55–8 George Putnam’s Sons publisher 91 Gérôme, Jean-Léon (1824–1904) 2, 6, 7, 9, 14, 22, 45, 96, 146–7, 162 n.41 Almeh 82, 132 Ave Caesar! Morituri te salutant (Hail Caesar! We Who Are about to Die Salute You) 102 Chariot Race 94, 102 Christian Martyr, Last Prayer 123 Collaboration 100 Death of Caesar 29–30, 37, 96, 102 Diogenes 36 Duel after the Masquerade 18, 19, 27, 104, 146 erotic subjects 82–3 L’Éminence grise 100, 146–7

232

Index

Louis XIV and the Grand Condé and Sword Dance 128 Moorish Bath 104 Officer of the Legion of Honor 33 Phryne before the Aeropagus 18 Pollice Verso 94, 102 Prayer in the Mosque 80–1, 118–19 The Prisoner 22 Pygmalion and Galatea 147 Reception of the Siamese Ambassadors at Fontainebleau 23 relationship with the World’s Columbian Exposition 133–9 sale prices 31–2, 34, 35–6 Snake Charmer 134, 146–7 The Sword Dance 80–2 Gibson, Henry (1830–1891) 126 Gifford, Sanford (1823–1880) 14–15 Gignoux, Régis (1816–1882) 156 n.34, 156 n.37 Gilded Age picture rush 2, 4–8, 10, 30–1, 35, 42, 46, 90, 111, 130–1, 145–8 art history surveys and 103 collections of 90–6, 101–3, 109 defined 5 European genre paintings 63, 87 ­international art market network of 8, 10, 25–6 landscape paintings 84 legacy of 148 military paintings 87 New York collections of 9, 47 periodicals and 96 pictures 6 Vanderbilt’s private art gallery 101 World’s Columbian Exposition 145 Girardin, Pauline (1818–1875), Pensées 87 Gleyre, Charles (1806–1874), The Bath 83 Gounod, Charles (1818–1893) 66 Goupil, Adolphe (1806–1893) 5, 8, 26–32, 34–5, 44–6, 126 Goupil & Co. 26, 32, 45, 80 Goupil, Jules-Adolphe (1839–1883) 61 Grand Medals of Honor 21–2, 31, 33 Grand Union Hotel, Saratoga Springs, NY 50 Great Modern Painters 105 Greatorex, Eliza Pratt (1819–1863), Old New York 86

Grove Dictionary of Art/Oxford Art Dictionary 104 Guy, Seymour Joseph (1824–1910), Crossing Sweeper 129 Hallowell, Sarah Tyson (1846–1924) 132–3, 138 Harper’s New Monthly 19 Harper’s Weekly 44, 98, 108 Haussmann, Baron (1809–1891) 11 Havemeyer, Henry O. (1847–1907) 142 Havemeyer, Louisine (1855–1929) 142 Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804–1864) 65 Healy, A. Augustus (1850–1921) 177 n.7 Henner, Jean-Jacques (1829–1905) La Source (The Source) 38–9, 84 Listening Nymph 95 St. Fabiola 75, 77, 108 sale prices 38 Henry, Edward Lamson (1841–1919), The 9:45 Accommodation 88 Hilton, Judge Henry (1824–1899) 9–10, 42, 123–4, 126 Hitchcock, Ripley (1857–1918) 60–1, 118 The Art Review 35 Hoe, Robert (1839–1909) 155 Holy Land 79 Home Journal 30 Homer, Winslow (1836–1910) 15, 17–18, 43, 88, 144–5 The Bright Side 18 Prisoners from the Front 15, 17–18, 89 Hoppin, Thomas F. (1816–1872) 14 Hoppin, William J. (1813–1895) 14 relationship with the Metropolitan Museum of Art 112 Hosmer, Harriet (1830–1908), Zenobia 86, 89 ­Hovenden, Thomas (1840–1895), Breaking Home Ties 144 Hubbard, Elbert (1856–1915) 70 Hudson River School 15, 23, 58 Huntington, Arabella (1851–1924) 129 Huntington, Archer Milton (1870–1955) 129

Index Huntington, Collis Potter (1821–1900) 1–2, 9, 35, 38, 40, 59, 129, 176 n.151, 176 n.153 collections of 9, 47, 49, 54, 57–8, 68, 77, 85, 88, 98–9, 101 connoisseurship of art 99 loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art 99 private gallery of 91 relationship with the Metropolitan Museum of Art 112 sale prices 38 Huntington, Daniel (1816–1906) 14, 117 Huntington, Henry E. (1850–1927) 149 n.4, 180 n.64, 192 n.117, 193 n.119 Huntington, William Reed (1838–1909) 116 Hunt, William Morris (1824–1879) 15–16, 18, 20–2 Hutton, Laurence (1843–1904), Artists of the Nineteenth Century and Their Works 103, 183 n.99, 183 n.103 Impressionism 133–4, 136–9, 141–2, 146 Impressionist art exhibition 134 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique (1780–1867) 134, 147 Inness, George (1825–1894) 14, 43–4, 142, 144–5, 191 n.99 Autumn Oaks 191 n.99 Institut de France 21, 33 Institute of Painters in Water-Colors, London 7 international art market 2, 8, 10, 25, 45 International Art Union 26 Israëls, Jozef (1824–1911) 191 n.99 Ives, Halsey Cooley (1847–1911) 132, 194 n.9, 194 n.16 Jaccaci, August (1857–1930) 173 n.101 Jacque, Charles-Émile (1813–1894) 85–6, 114 Jalabert, Charles-François (1819–1901) 18, 29 James, Henry (1843–1916) 1, 2, 24, 46, 125, 142, 149 n.3, 159 n.1, 159 n.2, 191 n.89 The American 25

233

James Stebbins auction sale 1889 98–9 Jarves, James Jackson (1818–1888) 6, 12, 16–18, 23, 38, 111–12, 113, 147, 160 n.17 critics on American fine arts 16–18 Jay, John (1817–1894) 112 Jenkins, J. Stricker (1831–1878) 174 n.124, 177 nn.6–7 Johnson, Eastman (1824–1906) 14, 18, 112, 158 n.63 Negro Life in the South (Old Kentucky Home) 12, 15 The New Bonnet 129 Johnston, James Boorman (1822–1887) 15 Johnston, John Taylor (1820–1893) 1, 12, 15, 28, 35, 54 collections of 9, 47, 49, 84–9, 94–7 president of Metropolitan Museum of Art 14, 93 private gallery of 91, 93, 178 n.26 relationship with the Metropolitan Museum of Art 111–13, 116 ­sale 1876 36–8, 40, 42–3, 103, 155 n.11 vice-president of the Pedestal Fund Loan Exhibition 94–5 journals and newspapers for marketing collections 96–100, 109 Kaulbach, William (1805–1874), Crusaders before Jerusalem 75 Kensett, John F. (1816–1872) 14, 112 Knaus, Ludwig (1829–1910) 6, 22, 35–6, 43, 99, 162 n.45 The Children’s Party 54–5, 105, 184 n.117 Coffee-House 44 Holy Family 76, 119–20 Road to Ruin 55, 58 Knoedler & Co. 8, 26, 82, 117, 142 Knoedler, Michael (1823–1878) 5, 7, 8, 12, 14–15, 36, 154 n.11 as art dealer 26–31, 45–6, 91, 96, 154 n.11 sale prices 27, 31, 34–5, 38 Knoedler, Roland (1856–1932) 127 KoekKoek, Barend Cornelis (1803–1862) 29 Korner, Madame 87, 89 Kurtz, Charles M. (1855–1909) 132

234

Index

Lambdin George Cochran (1830–1896) 18 Last Sleep 17 Lami, Eugène Louis (1800–1890) 87 Interior of a Museum 116–17 Landelle, Charles (1821–1908) Dolce far niente 55–8, 62–3 landscape paintings 84–7, 163 n.63 Laurens, Jean-Paul (1838–1921) 137 Lawrence, Sir Thomas (1769–1830), Calmady Children 129 Lefebvre, Jules-Joseph (1836–1911) 105, 114 Graziella 64, 119 Sappho 64 Legion of Honor 21, 33, 162 n.40 Lenox, James (1800–1880) 155 n.16 Lerolle, Henry (1848–1929), The Organ Rehearsal 126, 127 Leslie, Frank (1821–1880) 11 admired French paintings 18–19, 22–3 as American Commissioner to the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867 16 critics on US fine arts 16–18 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper 16 Report on the Fine Arts 12, 16 Leys, Henri, Baron (1815–1869) 22 Lhermitte, Léon (1844–1925), Grape Harvest 126 literary role models 64–9 “Little Egypt,” Fahreda Mahzar (c. 1871–1937) 132, 193 n.4 livestock paintings 85 loan exhibitions 91–5 London’s Crystal Palace Exhibition 36 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (1807–1882) 65 Loop, Henry (1831–1895), Oenone 114 Loop, Jeannette (1840–1909), Portrait of Cornelia Stewart 86, 89 ­Lorraine, Claude (1600–1682) 71 Loustaunau, Louis-Auguste-Georges (1846–1898), Morning Read 62 Low, Will Hicock (1853–1932) 83 Lucas, George A. (1824–1909) 2, 5, 32, 34–5, 36, 45, 87 as art dealer 26–31, 45–6 sale prices 34–5, 87 Luxembourg Museum 21, 33, 106

Madou, Jean-Baptiste (1796–1877) 114 Madrazo y Garreta, Raimundo de (1841–1920) 6 Magazine of Art 48 Makart, Hans (1840–1884), Dream after the Ball 120 Manet, Édouard (1832–1883) 127, 137, 138, 139, 141 Boy with a Sword 126, 138 Dead Toreador 139, 141 Young Lady 126 Mantz, Paul (1821–1895) 17, 18 marketing collections art history surveys 103–6 collection and auction catalogs 100–2 dictionaries 103–6 journals and newspapers 96–100 loan exhibitions 91–5 photographic reproductions and prints 106–8 private galleries 91–5 Marks, Montague (1847–1905) 48 Marquand, Henry Gurdon (1819–1902) 44, 126 Marquess of Hertford (1800–1870) 21–2 Max, Gabriel (1840–1915) 76, 123 The Last Token: A Christian Martyr 79, 94, 120, 123 McEntee, Jervis (1828–1891) 178 McLane, R. M. (1815–1898) 2 Meissonier, Ernest (1815–1891) 2, 6, 7, 19, 22, 31, 39, 45, 96, 133, 146–7 1807, Friedland 38, 40, 42, 70, 102, 105, 109, 120, 124, 125, 138 1814, The Campaign of France 18 A Brawl 43 Cavalier Awaiting an Audience 26, 36 Chess Players 102 Commander of the Legion of Honor 33 in dictionary entry 103, 106 Emperor at Solferino 21, 33 A General and His Aide-de-Camp 95, 119, 120 Information: General Desaix with the Army of the Rhine and Moselle 18, 20, 128

Index Marshal Saxe and Staff 37, 96 Napoleon III Surrounded by His General Staff 33 The Painters Willem van de Velde the Younger and Adriaen van de Velde Studying a Painting on an Easel 120, 122 patriotism 69–71, 87–8 Petit poste de grand’garde (Outpost of the Grand Guard) 100 ­Philosopher 34 Portrait of William Henry Vanderbilt 34 Reader 29 Reconnaissance 147 relationship with the World’s Columbian Exposition 133, 136–8 sale prices 31–2, 35–6 The Sign Painter 105 Soldier at Cards 37, 97 Standard Bearer 37 A View near Poissy 147 37, 97 Meixner, Laura 58–9, 128, 152 n.24 Ménard, René (1862–1930) 137 Merle, Hugues (1823–1881) 2, 6, 7, 9, 27, 29, 31, 133, 146 Allegory of Autumn 83, 120 Benedick and Beatrice 83, 102 Chasing the Butterfly 103 Christian Maiden 36 in dictionary entry 103 Falling Leaves 120 Ferdinand and Miranda 68–9, 129 The Good Sister 55, 57 Hamlet and Ophelia 66–7, 102 Maternal Love 55, 128 Primavera 21 St. Elizabeth of Hungary 75, 76 Merson, Luc-Olivier (1846–1920) 138 Metropolitan Museum of Art 91–2, 111–12 Blodgett bequest 112–13, 116 Board of Trustees 112, 114–15, 124, 130 Catharine Lorillard Wolfe bequest 110, 111, 115–21, 126, 134 The Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Gallery 110, 118–20, 128 Centennial Loan Exhibition 36, 93–5, 110

235

Cesnola bequest of Cypriot antiquities 113, 118, 127, 132 Collis P. Huntington bequest 40, 129 Contemporary Art 115–23 copyist in front of Rosa Bonheur’s Horse Fair 124–5 donations to 125–6 Fellows 112 Hilton bequest 9, 123–4, 126, 129 Impressionist art exhibition at 134 Loan Exhibition Committee 112, 114 Meissonier’s 1807, Friedland to 123–6 national identity and 115 opening in Central Park 114–15 Schaus bequest 117, 126, 129 Seney bequest 10, 126, 129 Sunday closing 115 William H. Vanderbilt Collection of Modern Pictures 128–30 ­The Metropolitan Museum of Art Handbook (book) 48 Metropolitan Opera 4 Meyer Von Bremen, Johann Georg (1813–1886) 114 Convalescent 176 n.153 military paintings 69–74, 87–8 Miller, Lillian B. (1923–1997), Patrons and Patriotism: The Encouragement of the Fine Arts in the United States, 1790–1860 (book) 2–3 Millet, Jean-François (1814–1875) 2, 18, 22, 35–6, 127, 133, 147 The Angelus 107–8, 127–8 Knitting Lesson 128 Peasant Leaning on His Hoe 141 The Sower 58, 60, 95, 128 symbolizing hard work 128 works on peasants life 57–61, 107 Mills, Darius O. (1825–1910) 117 Minerva 51 Mirbeau, Octave (1848–1917) 100 modern art history 148 Modern French Masters (book) 141 Monet, Claude (1840–1926) 6, 44, 133–4, 136, 138, 139, 140–2 Impression, Sunrise 139 Pourville in the Morning, Misty Weather 140

236 Monroe, Lucy (1865–1950) 138, 139, 143, 145 morality 47, 52, 53, 56, 87, 104, 107, 148 Morgan, J. P. (1837–1913) xviii, 153 n.32 Morgan Library & Museum 150 n.7 Morgan, Mary Jane (?-1885) catalogs 101 collections of 9, 47–9, 54, 61, 64, 75, 77, 83–4, 86 private gallery of 91 sale 1886 37–8, 40, 42–3, 98, 103 Morton, Levi P. (1824–1920) 177 n.7 Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and Collection 101 Müller, Charles (1815–1892), Scene at the Conciergerie Prison during the Roll Call of the Last Victims of the Reign of Terror, 9th Thermidor, 1793 37 Munkácsy, Mihaly (1844–1900) 36, 143 Mont de Piéte (The Pawnbroker’s Shop (?)) 119 Murray, Elizabeth Heaphy (c. 1815–1882), Eleventh Hour 86–7 Musée des beaux-arts, Bordeaux, Nantes 22 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 171 n.58 Muslims 80 Napoleon III. See Bonaparte, LouisNapoléon, Emperor Napoleon III National Academy of Design 13, 27, 33, 36, 86, 92, 93, 94, 110, 132 Centennial Loan Exhibitions 94, 110 Pedestal Loan Fund Exhibition 94–5 Newman, Christopher (fictional character) 25, 46 New York Centennial Loan Exhibition 36, 93, 94, 110 ­New York collections 47, 87. See also Belmont, August; Huntington, Collis Potter; Johnston, John Taylor; Morgan, Mary Jane; Stewart, Alexander T.; Vanderbilt, William Henry; Wolfe, Catharine Lorillard analysis of 47 categories of works in 48–9 genre paintings 52–64 landscapes 84 literary role models 64–9

Index military paintings 69–74, 87–8 by Morgan 47, 48 orientalist paintings 79–84 religious paintings 74–9, 88 by Wolfe 47, 48 New York Crystal Palace Exhibition 36 New-York Historical Society 33, 116 New York Observer and Chronicle 15, 98 New York Public Library 4 New York Times 12, 16, 18, 22, 28, 36, 37, 44, 48, 92, 94, 96, 99, 117, 119, 124, 128, 136, 137, 141 New York Tribune 13, 18, 22, 25, 96 Nicol, Erskine (1825–1904) 114 Nilsson, Christine (1843–1921) 66 noblesse oblige 7 North American Review 54 Old Master painting 5, 25, 32, 101, 113, 129, 145 Olyphant, Robert M. (1824–1917) 28 Oriental ‘concert-saloon’ 82 Orientalism/Orientalist painting 79–84, 119 Ott, John (1971-) 4, 115 Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California 3 Palace of the Fine Arts, World’s Columbian Exposition 135 Palmer, Bertha (1849–1918) 138 Palmer, Potter (1826–1902) 138 Paris École des beaux-arts (School of Fine Arts) 6, 34, 143 Paris Salon 2, 6, 8, 20, 25–7, 31, 33, 52, 62, 79, 84, 86, 100, 124, 126, 136, 142, 195 n.27 Pedestal Fund Loan Exhibition 94–5 periodicals 96–100 Perkins, Charles Callahan (1823–1886), Cyclopedia of Painters and Paintings (book) 103–4, 183 n.106 Petit, Galerie Georges 31, 34 photographic reproductions and prints for marketing collections 106–8 Pils, Isidore (1813–1875) 21, 34 Preyer, Emilie (1849–1930) 86 Preyer, Johann Wilhelm (1803–1889) 86

Index private art galleries 3, 35, 91–5, 99, 101, 110 Proust, Antonin (1832–1905) 127–8, 137 Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre (1824–1898) 136–9, 141 Quincy Adams Shaw collection 171 n.58 ­Reed, J. E., One Hundred Crowned Masterpieces of Modern Painting 104–5 Reichardt, New York dealer 30 religious pictures 74–9, 88 Rembrandt (1606–1669) 162 n.45 Renoir, Auguste (1841–1919) 136, 138, 142 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, Lady Smith (Charlotte Delaval) and Her Children (George Henry, Louis, and Charlotte) 129 Rhodes, Albert (1840–1894) 53 Richards, William Trost (1833–1905) 156 n.37 Rimmel, Eugene (1820–1887) 17–18 Rittner & Goupil, Paris gallery 26 Rittner, Henry (1802–1840) 26 Robert-Fleury Tony (1837–1911) 18 Roberts, Marshall O. (1813–1880) 12, 14, 112 Robinson, Theodore (1852–1896) 104 Rousseau, Théodore (1812–1867) 22, 35–6, 44, 128, 141 Gorge d’Apremont 128 Ruskin, John (1819–1900) 36 Saint-Gaudens, Augustus (1848–1907) 132 Saintin, Jules-Émile (1829–1894) 61 Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de, Paul et Virginie (novel) 121 St. Elizabeth of Hungary 75 St. Fabiola. See Henner, Jean-Jacques St. Nicholas 60 San Francisco Chronicle 107 Sargent, John Singer (1856–1925) 143, 145 Louise Pomeroy Inches 143 Portrait of Mrs. Edward L. Davis and Her Son, Livingston Davis 143 Saule, A. 53 Schaus, William (1820–1892) 8, 26, 30–1, 96, 117, 126 Scheffer, Ary (1795–1858) 26

237

Schreyer, Adolf (1828–1899), Battle Scene: Arabs Making a Detour 126 Schroeder, Jonathan E. 47 Secrétan sale in Paris, 1889 127 Sedelmeyer, Charles (1837–1925) 34 Seney, George (1826–1893) 10, 35, 42, 126, 129, 142 sale 1894 43–4, 103 sentimentality 53, 66, 74, 77–8, 84, 87–8 Seton-Watson, Hugh (1916–1984) 173 n.94 Seward, William (1801–1872) 14 Shakespeare 66, 68, 69, 102 slavery 49, 51–2, 59, 83 social class. See class/class system social harmony, pictures of 49 social responsibility 7 Société des artistes français 135, 195 n.27 Société nationale des beaux-arts 136, 195 n.27 Spencer, Albert 98, 134 statistics, art market 35–44 ­Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World pedestal 94 Stevens, Alfred (1823–1906) 45, 143 Impressions on Painting (book) 45 Ready for the Fancy Dress Ball 63 Stewart, Alexander T. (1803–1876) 1, 35, 49–50, 58–9, 94, 100–1 collections of 9, 47, 49–51, 66, 85–6, 89, 97–8, 102 Picture Gallery at 1 West 34th Street 41 as president of the Honorary Commission in Universal Exposition 12 private gallery of 91 relationship with the Metropolitan Museum of Art 111–12 sale 1887 37–40, 42–3, 103, 123–4, 167 n.17 Stewart, Cornelia M. Clinch (c. 1802– 1886) 35, 86, 89, 94, 98, 100, 102 still lifes/flower paintings 86 Strahan, Edward (Earl Shinn) (1838–1886) 80, 83, 124–6, 147 Art Treasure of America (book) 7, 90, 101–2, 104, 117, 120, 123, 167 n.13

238

Index

masterpiece collections 102 Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and Collection 101–2 Stranahan, Clara H. (1831–1904) 61, 104, 134 A History of French Painting (book) 103–4, 134 Stuart, Robert L. (1806–1882) 12, 14, 28 Studio 45, 98, 119–20 Sturges, Jonathan (1802–1874) 154–5 n.11, 155 n.17 Sutton, James F. (1843–1915) 127–8 symbolic environment, collections 47 tariff on foreign art 44 Tenth Street Studio Building 14, 15, 27 Thiers, Adolphe (1797–1877) 70 Thoré, Théophile (1807–1869) 18 Toulmouche, Auguste (1829–1890) 7, 29, 54, 55, 61, 102, 106, 133, 146 Forbidden Fruit 22 Maternal Embraces 55–6 Serious Book 102 Troyon, Constant (1810–1865) 2, 31, 35, 37, 44, 85 Autumn Morning 37 Landscape and Cattle 37 On the Road 85 sale prices 37 Tuckerman, Henry T. (1813–1871) 12, 30–2 Artist-Life, or, Sketches of American Painters (book) 14 Book of the Artists (book) 14, 155 n.15 critics on US fine arts 16–18 as patriotic critic 24 Turner, J. M. W. (1775–1851) 128 Fountain of Indolence 128–9 sale prices 37 Slave Ship 36–7, 89 Twain, Mark (1835–1910) 168 n.28 Two van de Veldes painting 190 n.71 Union League Club 112, 185 n.8, 185 n.10 ­ e United States. See also New York Th collections art history surveys in 103 art professionals 3, 7 artworks in 90 common travelling Americans 1

critics on US fine arts 16–18, 23 cultural incompetence 1 dictionaries 103 fine arts at Universal Exposition, Paris, 1867 12–13, 16 Foreign Masterpieces Owned in the United States 10, 130–5, 137–42, 146 Gilded Age picture rush 5, 131 history and ideologies, visual summary of 50–2 industries at Universal Exposition, Paris, 1867 11–12 landscape painting 84 loan collection 10, 92, 109–10, 130–5, 137–42, 146 (see also World’s Columbian Exposition) paintings sale 36–8, 40–3 photographic reproductions 106 tariff on foreign art 44 Universal Exposition, Paris 1855 11, 13, 15, 30, 146 1867 5, 8, 11, 15–18, 25, 29, 31, 33, 44, 50, 101, 112, 131, 133, 145 1878 100, 102, 120, 132, 143 American and French critics 8, 12–13, 16–20 American Committee for 13–15, 154 n.10 awards and honors 20–2 catalog in 19–20, 23 French arts at 11–12, 18–23 lenders and institutions 21–2 US fine arts at 12–13, 16 US industries at 11–12 US Department of Fine Arts 132 Vanderbilt II, Cornelius (1843–1899) 9–10, 38, 98, 123–4 Vanderbilt, George W. (1862–1914) 115, 128, 186 n.25 Vanderbilt, William Henry (1821–1885) 1, 28, 34–5, 37, 54, 100, 123, 175 n.144 catalogs 100–1 collections of 9, 47–9, 55, 62–6, 71–3, 77, 80, 84–6, 89, 95, 99, 101, 105 private gallery of 91, 101 relationship with the Metropolitan Museum of Art 111–14, 128–30

Index Van Dyke, John C. (1856–1932) 133–4, 136, 143, 145, 146 Van Hook, Bailey (1953–) 61–3, 65, 84 van Marcke, Émile (1827–1890) 85, 114 Landscape and Cattle 94 van Rensselaer, Mariana Griswold (1851–1934) 95, 124 Verboeckhoven, Eugène (1798–1881) 85 Vermeer, Johannes (1632–1675), Woman with a Lute 129 Viardot, Louis (1800–1883), Masterpieces of French Art (book) 106 Vibert, Goupil, & Co. 26 ­Vibert, Jehan-George (1840–1902) 2, 6, 77–8, 100, 137–8 Committee on Moral Books 128 The Missionary’s Adventures 38, 40, 54, 77, 98, 105 Narcissus 22 Palm Sunday in Spain 76 sale prices 38 Startled Confessor 76 von Piloty, Karl Theodor (1826–1886), Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins 75 Walters Art Museum 19, 29, 57, 154 Walters, William T. (1819–1894) 27–8, 103, 104, 132 Wappers, Baron Gustavus (1803–1874) Confidences 120 Weinberg, Barbara (1942–) 4 Weisberg, Gabriel 4 Weir, J. Alden (1852–1919) 94 Wheeler, David (1927–2004) 66–7 Whistler, James Abbot McNeil (1834–1903) 17–18, 143, 145 Lady with the Yellow Buskin 143 Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl 15, 17 White, Edwin (1817–1877) 13 Whittredge, Worthington (1820–1910) 14–15 Wolfe, Catharine Lorillard (1828–1887) 1, 9–10, 35, 46, 63, 104–5, 110–12, 115, 117–21, 126, 128, 134

239

collections of 9, 47–9, 64, 75–80, 83–4, 86, 89, 101–2, 104 lenders to Centennial Loan Exhibition 94 private gallery of 91 relationship with the Metropolitan Museum of Art 111–21 sale prices 42–3 Wolfe, John (1821–1894) 35, 48, 126 sale 1894 42–3, 48 vice-president of the Pedestal Fund Loan Exhibition 94–5 Wolfe, John David (1792–1872) 116, 118 women artists. See Bonheur, Rosa; Escallier, Eléonore; Girardin, Pauline; Greatorex, Eliza Pratt; Hosmer, Harriet; Korner, Madame; Loop, Jeannette; Murray, Elizabeth; Preyer, Emilie World’s Columbian Exposition 5, 10, 42–4, 131–7, 145 American fine arts section 133 competition and awards 133 Foreign Masterpieces Owned in the United States (US loan collection) 92, 109–10, 130–5, 137–42, 146 French fine arts section 133–5 Palace of the Fine Arts 135 “worthy poor” 148 Wright, Carroll D. (1840–1909) 54, 106–7 “The Practical Value of Art” (article) 54 Wyant, A. H. (1836–1892) 191 n.99 Yvon, Adolphe (1817–1893) 7, 148 Genius of America 9, 49–52, 88, 98 ­knowledge, civilization and morality 51–2 in Paris Salon catalog 52 Zamacois, Eduardo (1873–1971) 6 Ziegler, Jules-Claude (1804–1856) 86

240

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