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Published by
the Museum of Fine Arts, copyright Boston MA 1986 Edition. Having 235
pages, illustrated with 112 catalogued paintings, illustrated in both color and
black/white, with Index of Artists, specifically 40 artists included in the exhibition; Artists' Biographies,
Bibliography; and Appendix. Bound in cloth 6. by 8.75 inch hard covers, still
in original dust jacket showing minor exterior wear and soiling, now
protected within clear plastic wrapper, otherwise binding still
internally tight and strong, contents clean and bright, and overall in
very good condition.
(text taken from
introduction...)
Boston always took it for granted that the best painters in America were her own, and for much of the city's history, this assumption was valid enough. From the Freake Limner in the late seventeenth century to Smibert and Copley in the eighteenth and then Gilbert Stuart in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, painting in America meant the portrait, and for the ablest talents and most modern styles in portraiture, one looked to Boston. However, by the time of Stuart's death in 1828, Boston's position - artistically, economically, and in other ways - had changed dramatically. It was now only the third largest city in the nation, relatively small and provincial in comparison to cosmopolitan Philadelphia and to commercial New York, which was booming as a result of the newly opened Erie Canal. Nonetheless, in Boston great fortunes continued to be made in shipping and trade, and later in textiles and railroads, by Elias Hasket Derby, Thomas Handasyd Perkins, John Murray Forbes, and Amos and Abbott Lawrence, among others; they and their descendants, together with a handful of families whose money and position dated from before the Revolution, made up the tightly knit "Brahmin" class that dominated Boston for the entire nineteenth century and beyond.
In terms of culture, Boston became during this time the undoubted literary and educational center of the nation. William L. Vance, in his essay below, writes of Boston's reliance on the written word. The birth of mature American letters, the so-called American Renaissance, was fueled by writers from Puritan and Brahmin families of Boston, Concord, Cambridge, Salem, and nearby Maine, including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, James Russell Lowell (of the wealthy textile family), Francis Parkman (who in ill health dictated his Oregon Trail to his cousin, Quincy Adams Shaw), and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
As Boston came to dominate America's literary mainstream, so at the very same time it began to rescind its traditional, oft-stated demand for the "latest and best" in furnishings and paintings. Stuart's portrait-painting students and successors prospered, but they were hardly major masters. At a time when New York was quick to patronize new and demonstrably American painters who were working in innovative modes, depicting everyday, middle-class rural and frontier life in "genre" paintings and celebrating on canvas the grandeur of American landscape scenery with topographical exactitude, Boston instead lionized Washington Allston, who became the leading painter in the city in the years between his return from London in 1818 and his death in 1843. A Harvard-educated gentleman, like so many of the prominent writers, Allston himself was an author and theorist, an intellectual and idealist. As a painter, he looked not to America and the present, as did New York's burgeoning Hudson River School and its genre painters led by William Sidney Mount; rather, he venerated Europe and the past. This "man of genius," as Coleridge called him, painted practically no commissioned portraits, his landscapes were done from romantic memory rather than observation, and his great love was history painting after biblical or Shakespearean texts in the style of Venetian Renaissance masters. Allston fitted Boston's increasingly literary attitude, where ideas in art seemed more important than their visual realization, and it was easy for Bostonians - as accustomed to artistic prominence as they were - to assume that the English critic Anna Jameson was correct in describing Allston as "not only the greatest painter America has yet produced, but one of the greatest painters of the age." In fact, Allston symbolizes (though he surely did not cause) Boston's turn toward an art that was idealistic rather than materialistic, one that was poetic in spirit, European-minded, historically conscious, subtly colored, and looked
for alternatives to what Bostonians called the "crass materialism" of New York.
Allston's death in 1843 and the discovery that his long-anticipated masterpiece, Belshazzar's Feast, lay in unfinished ruin in his studio, made manifest the city's swift and complete fall from artistic preeminence. Amid the prospering merchants and the superb writers one could point, in painting, only to the small talents of a Francis Alexander or a Chester Harding. There was a truly magnificent marine painter who was just beginning his careeer to the north of Boston in Gloucester, but his style seemed primitive, unsophisticated, and very literal to eyes that had so loved Allston, and it would require another full century before Fitz Hugh Lane was fully recognized.
When William Morris Hunt returned to Boston in 1855 after studying with Thomas Couture and making friends with the great Barbizon master JeanFrancois Millet in France, he must have been greeted as a prodigal son. With his handsome urbanity, his passion and artistic flair, and his close European connections, he fitted Boston's requirements exactly and he must have seemed a pure artistic genius from the Allston mold. In addition, he was a New Englander, well born, and his lack of wealth was quickly remedied when he married a Boston heiress - following the examples of Allston and Copley before him....
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