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Portrait of a Lady (Mrs. Seymour Fort)
Artist: John Singleton Copley
(American, 1738-1815)
Oil on canvas; 49 ½ x 39 5/8 in.
c. 1776-1780
Gallery Fund, 1901.34
In the spring of 1774 the rising political turmoil in Boston induced Copley, the country’s leading portrait painter, to depart for England where he would remain for the rest of his life. Painting in London, he would continue to imbue his portraits with an extraordinary immediacy, as seen in this portrait, considered one of his finest works.
Although traditionally known as Mrs. Seymour Fort, the actual identity of this sitter has never been confirmed. Copley exhibited a painting titled Portrait of a Lady; Three Quarters at the Royal Academy in London in 1778, which suggests that it may have been this portrait. The woman’s costume—her frilly headdress, or dormouse, and her dress, fashioned with a pointed-stomacher—was appropriate for an elderly lady during the late 1770s. Looking out at the viewer with an intelligent gaze, Mrs. Fort occupies herself with a knotting shuttle. Practiced in England and Europe from about the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, knotting was a popular pastime for aristocratic ladies. Of little practical value, it served principally to show off a woman’s graceful dexterity and to indicate an aversion to idleness.
Oliver and Abigail Wolcott Ellsworth
Artist: Ralph Earl
(American, 1751-1801)
Oil on canvas; 76 x 86 3/4 in.
1792
Gift of the Heirs, 1903.7
Earl painted this portrait of Oliver and Abigail Ellsworth at their home in Windsor, Connecticut, on the Connecticut River. An icon of the constitutional period, this is one of the artist’s most creative portraits.
The artist successfully depicts Ellsworth’s role in the formative stages of the United States. Ellsworth (1745-1807) was a graduate of Princeton College, a successful lawyer, and a member of the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention. He played a significant role in the writing of and ratification of the Constitution and later became the third Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Earl centrally places a copy of the recently ratified U.S. Constitution (including the text for Article Seven which was authored by Ellsworth) as well as the view of the Ellsworth’s newly renovated and painted homestead to suggest Oliver and Abigail’s separate but overlapping spheres of influence and responsibility. Though Oliver alone holds the document and only Abigail is connected by the drapery in the background to the house and surrounding farmlands, they each contributed to the other’s success. Abigail, who at the age of 35 had given birth to the last of her nine children the year before her portrait was painted, is portrayed in a truthful manner by the artist. The couple’s newly renovated house (in which they are seated) is also shown through the window.
Coast Scene, Mount Desert
(Sunrise off the Maine Coast)
Artist: Frederic Edwin Church
(American, 1826-1900)
Oil on canvas; 36 1/8 x 48 in.
1863
Bequest of Clara Hinton Gould, 1948.178
By the mid-nineteenth century, Church had become a national figure, winning popular recognition, financial gain, and critical acclaim for his spectacular wilderness views of the Northeast as well as of more exotic South American locales.
“There is no such picture of wild, reckless abandonment to its own impulses, as the fierce, frolicsome march of a gigantic wave,” Church wrote after observing the sea off Mt. Desert Island, Maine. The artist traveled to this wilderness site at least seven times in the 1850s and 1860s, and the Atheneum’s painting, perhaps his finest seascape, is based on an oil sketch done on the spot. In the final oil, Church captures a compelling sense of drama and energy; the viewer directly confronts the sea and its sublime power.
The Last of the Mohicans,
Cora Kneeling at the Feet of Tamenund
Artist: Thomas Cole
(Anglo-American, 1901-1848)
Oil on canvas; 25 1/8 x 35 1/16 in.
1827
Bequest of Alfred Smith, 1868.3
Cole’s painting The Last of the Mohicans was inspired by a passage from James Fenimore Cooper’s popular novel of the same title, which became an instant best seller after its publication in early 1826. Cole combined the real and the ideal in this work – a faithful rendering of White Mountain, New Hampshire, scenery in the background with idealized geological features which enhance the minute narrative scene in the foreground. Casting herself in front of Tamenund, Chief of the Delaware, Cora pleads for mercy for her sister and herself as warrior Magua looks on. Behind Magua, rocking stone rests precariously atop a high pinnacle, and, to its right, a large cave appears behind the group of figures, evoking the sexual tension in Cooper’s novel.
The Atheneum’s founder, Daniel Wadsworth, who was Cole’s most important early patron, acquired this painting shortly after its completion for his growing art collection, that featured the works of Cole.
The Faithful Colt
Artist: William Harnett
(American, born in Ireland, 1848-1892)
Oil on canvas; 22 1/2 x 18 1/2 in.
1890
The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1935.236
Raised in Philadelphia, Harnett was certainly aware of the city’s long tradition of still-life painting, beginning with the family of Charles Wilson Peale. But rather than following this example, Harnett reinvented the tradition of illusionistic and trompe l’oeil (“fool the eye”) still-life painting, exploring such original subjects as money. He painted a number of works featuring single suspended objects, such as the Colt revolver—a common model owned by Harnett himself—in this painting. The gun exhibits convincing signs of age, seen in the cracked and yellowed ivory handle and rusting metal barrel, but at the same time carries the bright sheen of a well-cared-for object that is still ready for use.
Emerald Pool, Yellowstone
Artist: John Twachtman
(American, 1853-1902)
Oil on canvas; 24 1/4 x 30 1/4 in.
c. 1895
Bequest of George A. Gay, by exchange, and The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1979.162.
Twachtman spent time in Yellowstone National Park in the fall of 1895, painting works that featured the Upper and Lower Falls and the Emerald Pool. Abstract in nature, Twachtman’s Emerald Pool demonstrates exquisite handling of the sun-touched mists and the transparent green surface of the sulfur spring. Employing techniques characteristic of Impressionism, he uses a lighter and brighter palette and loose airy brushstrokes that allow the canvas to show through. His flattening of natural forms into abstract shapes and sinuous outlines suggests a contemporary aesthetic and reflects the artist’s interest in Japanese art. Overwhelmed by the vast scenery of Yellowstone Park, Twachtman responded confidently to the pools and their “refined color” and on canvas humanized the emerald-green sulfur springs set amid snow and veiling mists.
Coast of Brittany
Artist: James Abbott McNeill Whistler (American, 1834-1903)
Oil on canvas; 34 3/8 x 45 1/2 in.
1861
In memory of William Arnold Healy, given by his daughter Susie Healy Camp, 1925.393
Whistler spent three months on the coast of Brittany, France, in the fall of 1861, where he painted Coast of Brittany, his first major seascape. The artist’s depiction of the beach and rugged coastline demonstrates the influence of Gustav Courbet in the thick impasto and bold handling of paint, and the unsentimental portrayal of the young girl in peasant costume, asleep against a rock ledge.
Dancer
Artist: Elie Nadleman
(American, born in Poland, 1882-1946)
Cherry wood
1918
Gift of James L. Goodwin and Henry Sage Goodwin, 1958.224
Nadleman arrived in America in 1911, and continued to create sculpture. He turned to genre figures and created stylized, fluid and elegant freestanding sculptures. Works such as Dancer have a formal, unaffected simplicity—using wood rather than bronze or metal—and are inspired, in part, by folk art, which Nadleman began collecting in America. Dancer is constructed of cherry wood and covered with a reddish-brown stain, and then painted to demarcate clothing, hair, and facial features.
The Lawrence Tree
Artist: Georgia O’Keeffe
(American, 1887-1986)
Oil on canvas; 31 x 40 in.
1929
The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection, 1981.23
As a leading American modernist, O’Keeffe painted The Lawrence Tree during the first summer she spent in her adopted home state of New Mexico. It shows the trunk and branches of a ponderosa pine, viewed looking up from the base of the tree and reaching toward a glittering night sky. The original tree grew on a ranch near Taos that belonged to the writer D. H. Lawrence whom O’Keeffe frequently visited.
When the Wadsworth Atheneum acquired the painting in 1981, O’Keeffe commented that, “The painting was done so it could be hung with any end up.” The painting is presently hung in keeping with the artist’s strong early preference, which she stated on numerous occasions, instructing that the tree should “stand on its head.”
Military
Artist: Marsden Hartley
(American, 1877-1943)
Oil on canvas
1913
The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1973.2
Hartley was fascinated with the life in Berlin, Germany, from the moment he first arrived there in early January 1913. In Military, Hartley concentrated on the secular pageantry he saw about him. Showing sounds blaring out of a horn, Hartley translated them into vivid, swirling colors, amid mystical numbers. Hartley’s memories of the period are characterized by a sexualization of military imagery, as he described:
"It was of course the age of iron—of blood and iron. Every backbone in Germany was made of it—or had new iron poured into it—the whole scene was fairly bursting with organized energy and the tension was terrific and somehow voluptuous in the feeling of power—a sexual immensity even in it, when passion rises to the full and something must happen to quiet it."
Captain Strout’s House, Portland Head
Artist: Edward Hopper
(American, 1882-1967)
Watercolor on paper
1927
The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1928.3
The coast of Maine provided inspiration for Hopper as well as a generation of modern American artists. This large scale watercolor, Captain Strout’s House, Portland, Maine, incorporates two of Hopper’s most notable architectural themes—lighthouses and houses. Hopper was able to impart in watercolor the same solidity and dignity present in the opacity of his oil paintings. Rather than exploit the watercolor medium for its flashing or bravura effects, he used its transparency to accentuate space. The dense, opaque red of the shed at the lower right, forms a sharp contrast to the delicate, subtly shaded washes of the blue sky, balancing the composition and giving it illusionistic depth.
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